In the penny arcades of upper Broadway, in the gaudy Sixth Avenue Sportland of Schork & Schaffer, in all the dark and smoky dens where New Yorkers drop hundreds of millions of nickels into coin machines and peep shows, the name of William Rabkin is great indeed. A fast-talking Jew of 40 with a passion for invention, William Rabkin gave the world the coin-operated electric digger. This glass-encased device has nervous metal claws on the end of a shaft which is manipulated by a row of dials outside. The shaft hangs over a pile of hard candies. With a little money and a lot of skill a player can so jiggle the dials that the claws will fish out of the candy a lady’s compact or a silver ash tray.
Mr. Rabkin is president and owner of International Mutoscope Reel Co., Inc. The company was founded in 1895 to make peep shows of girls going to bed, the cook kissing the policeman and little Johnny getting a spanking. One of the firm’s early artists was Mary Pickford, hired to pose at $5 per day when the weather was good. Photographs were taken on the roof of the company’s building on 14th Street, under the direction of David Wark Griffith, whose salary was $25 per week. Soon the little company, then called American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., split, Biograph going on to cinema fame & fortune, American Mutoscope Co. to the manufacture of strength testographs, all manner of penny arcade devices.
In his Manhattan office last week Mr. Rabkin rubbed his hands with ill-concealed delight. Business was on the boom. This year the makers of penny arcade machines had hoped to gross $7,500,000. Already their income was above that figure. “Why, the industry’s going to take in $12,000,000,” chuckled Mr. Rabkin. His colleagues knew that the principal reason for their joyous prosperity was that glass-encased gadget which is currently the most popular and the most profitable of all penny arcade devices—the pin game.
The pin game is bagatelle (also known as sans égal, Mississippi, cockamaroo, contact with variations. The player drops a coin in the slot which releases a plunger. With the plunger he drives a ball down crooked alleyways of pins until it scores by dropping into one of many holes in the board. For his total score he receives a certain number of coupons exchangeable for merchandise. The average player, of course, spends much more accumulating sufficient points to win, say, a $25 radio than he would if he went out and bought the instrument for cash. Smart players can run up enough points to get more in merchandise than they put into the machine in coins. Some make the game a profession, carry their own bubble levels to gauge the tilt of each table. Others try to beat the house by marking the plunger with a pencil at the proper point to send the ball into a high score hole with every shot. The house mechanic spends much time removing marks from plungers.
In New York the oldtime slot machine which turns out grimy pieces of chewing gum at the drop of a coin is illegal as soon as it is converted into a money-paying gambling device. But the pin game is a game of skill, according to a ruling of the Department of Licenses. Last week the License Commissioner announced that some 10,000 pin game machines had been licensed at $5 a machine. Wiseacres estimated that another 25,000 machines are being operated in the city without licenses. An organization called the Skill Games Board of Trade was formed last year by shrewd Leslie G. Anderson of Billboard (amusement weekly) to round up unlicensed operators, keep racketeers out of the business.
The win game manufacturers, a small respectable family of 35, have their own NRA code. Like the four Mills brothers* who make vending machines adorned with plums and cherries, they keep at a safe distance from the sleazy arcades. They sell pin games to the wholesaler. The wholesaler sells them to the operator for $40 or $50. The operator takes a machine around to cafes, smoke shops, arcades, where he installs it with the permission of the owner, known as the “location” man. The operator and location man split 50-50 or 60-40 on the proceeds during the life of a machine. A good machine may last six months. After that it loses its popularity, and the professionals begin to get on to it. The operator carts it away and comes back with another variation of the pin game—baseball, football, trains, games that ring bells or make pellets jump.
Big manufacturers like Rabkin, and Chicago’s D. Gottlieb & Co., Bally Manufacturing Co., Genco, Inc., and Rockola Manufacturing Co., are never at a loss for new ideas. Last week Mr. Rabkin’s staff of artists and engineers were busy on a pin game checker board in red, gold and black with bulbous gold clouds from which issue silver thunderbolts. Before it is released this week or next the final drawings will be submitted to a commercial artist for advice. The firm’s own designers, says Mr. Rabkin, get so wrought up over each new creation that they are totally unable to see the simplest flaws.
*Not to be confused with the four Mills Brothers, John, Harry, Herbert and Don, of Radio fame.
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