Hello it's blogging time once again and it's July 4th again , and that means its Independence Day again! In fact its quite special this year as it's the United States Semiquincentennial, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. But today, were gonna go back about 50 years to 1976 during the United States Bicentennial, to look at something that commemorated the founding of the country we call home. Its also gonna be different as were not looking at a video game, but rather the other form of entertainment that was the king of arcades long before them: Pinball.
Yes long before video games became king, Pinball machines lined up arcades to take people quarters. In fact, some pinball manufacturers became game manufactures like the makers of the particular machine we're looking at today: Spirit of 76, designed by Ed Krynski and Wayne Neyens, by D. Gottlieb & Co. (Later Gottlieb) in 1975.
Yes, that's the same Gottlieb that would go on to create Qbert. But Before that, They were an innovator in the pinball business their story begins with their founder and namesake: David C. Gottlieb.
Born in Born in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 1900 to Russian Jewish immigrants, David Gottlieb began his career in 1922 after dropping out of the University of Minnesota to work as a movie theater booker and traveling salesman in Minneapolis before moving to Dallas, Texas, selling punchboards (pressed paper boards full of holes each containing a slip of paper that listed a cash or merchandise prize) to isolated oilfields.
Gottlieb soon got fed up with the punchboard salesman gig, so he soon turned to a traveling motion picture business instead. Each day, he would load up a film projector into his Ford Model T, drive to towns to small to have their own theater and show movies to the people in the town. But in the meantime, he also sold slot machines and countertop games across the town.
Though it didn't last, as Texas cracked down on slot machines, So Gottlieb went a different route and acquired the rights to produce a countertop grip tester. On the advice of his childhood friend and coin-op manufacturer and distributor Al Walzer, he relocated to Chicago, where with a loan from Walzer he formed D. Gottlieb and Company in 1927, With their first product being the Husky Grip Tester, A strengh tester machine inspired by the similar machines of Charles Chizewar, Who Gottlieb worked with previously.
Then in 1931, Nate Robin and Al Rest approached Gottlieb offering the exclusive manufacturing and distribution rights for a game called Bingo. Bingo was inspired by Chizewar's earlier Roll-a-Ball, itself inspired by Whiffle and Whoopee, early ancestors to pinball machines. Gottlieb not only took the offer but completely redesigned it to improve the quality and make it easier to manufacture.
But when the game became succesful, Robin and Rest did a side deal with Leo Berman and cut their deal with Gottlieb. So he decided to create his own version and improved the efficency even further by moving production to an assembly line. He called his version Baffle Ball, and it went on sale in October of 1931.
It made history as the first commercially successful mass market pin game, with Gottlieb receiving over 75,000 orders for the game and even with the improvements to manufacturing could only produce about 400 per day filling roughly 50,000 of them. Soon other manufacturers like Bally, Pacific Amusement, and Rockola, all made similar machines.
Unbeknownst to Gottlieb, his machine sparked a boom the industry, because as the Great Depression raged across America, businesses need someway to make revenue. Games like Baffle Ball were small, easy to maintain, and were cheap to buy at $16.50 a machine.
As a result the buisness boomed and the Pin Game eventually evolved into what we know as Pinball, and gottlieb lead that growing industry with many innovations in the game over the next 3 decades with machines such as Humpty Dumpty (The first pinball game with flippers) in 1947, Super Jumbo (The first 4 player pinball game) in 1954, and Flipper (The first pinball game with extra ball) in 1960.
However, by the 70's, tradgedy struck, David Gottlieb passed away in 1974 at the age of 73 leaving the company in the hands of brother Nate, his son Alvin and his son in law, Judd Weinberg whom he gave the responsibility to after his retirement. Luckily the pinball industry was still doing well, and Gottlieb itself was doing well, leading the pinball scene in Chicago alongside Bally and Williams.
Meanwhile in the nations capital, Washington DC, The US Congress was hard at work to come up with a celebration for the 200th annaverasry of the United States.They created the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission on July 4, 1966 and Initially planned it as a single city exposition (titled Expo '76) that would be staged in either Philadelphia or Boston. But after 6½ years of debate, the Commission recommended that there should not be a single event. So Congress dissolved it on December 11, 1973, and created the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (or ARBA) and charged it with encouraging and coordinating locally sponsored events.
It kicked off in 1973 with the Boston Oil Party, where activists and history enthusiasts recreated the Boston Tea Party. Participants and spectators boasted signs and effigies in an effort to premoting environmental protection, racial justice, an end to corporate profiteering, and the impeachment of Richard Nixon. It was exactly the same as the original even but instead of dumping tea, they threw packages and oil barrels labeled "Gulf Oil" and "Exxon" into Boston Harbor in symbolic opposition to corporate power. roughly 10,000 people witnessed the dumping of oil conglomerates, as well as the hanging of an effigy of President Nixon.
Once things became official in 1975, things became a little more light hearted with several events across the country. the American Freedom Train launched in Wilmington, Delaware to start its 21-month, 25,388-mile (40,858 km) tour of the 48 contiguous states, President Gerald Ford traveled to Boston to light a third lantern at the historic Old North Church, symbolizing America's third century, There was Opperation Sail where more than 200 ships from all over to the Hudson River to participate in a boat parade, the Wagon Train Pilgrimage to Pennsylvania where 50 18th-century-style wagons retraced the steps of early settlers by traveling west to east, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip toured the Northeast dedicating the Liberty Bell, Bicentennial were put on players durring Super Bowl X, and a large firework display in Washington DC.
These events were certainly on the minds of the designers at Gottlieb, and they certainly saw an opprotunity to create a machine with a theme to commemorate the event. Spirit of 76 made its debut in December 1975, Just in time for the conclusion of the bicentential. The machine was notable as it was the last machine designed by Wayne Neyens, who had been with Gottlieb since 1939. In Addition to the main 4 player version, There were also 2 two player variations sold: Pioneer and New York.
The latter was a special version that had Add-a-ball and was made in celebration of the 1976 lifting of the ban of pinball in New York City. That itself was a big deal as it broke a gambling association that haunted the pinball industry for decades.
It all started with a simple modifacation. In 1933, a New York distributor named Herman Seiden added a dry cell battery to a Bally Airway table in order to power a connected payout slot, which would dispense money if the ball landed in the proper scoring holes. It proved to be so popular that Seiden decided to share his innovation with Bally, leading company engineer Herb Breitenstein to develop a game called Rocket, the first purpose-made gambling pinball machine. The table was so successful that Bally founder Ray Moloney decided to fully commit the company to coin-op manufacturing.
Soon, all the major pinball manufacturers were releasing payout machines alongside their regular games and this lead to major backlash toward the industry, pinball was already being attacked for inciting juvenile delinquency and petty crime and corrupted the youth. Now with the gambling connection as well, it drew attention from crusaders against organized crime, which had already taken advantage of the cash only nature of the slot machine business to take in large sums of untraceable money to fund other illicit operations. With slot machines already pushed to private clubs and casinos by law enforcement efforts to wipe out the industry, politicians believed that pinball machines were an attempt by organized crime to circumvent laws against slot machine operation, and the move to payout models only reinforced these suspicions.
As a result, newly elected New York City Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia launched a campaign against pinball machines in 1934 as part of his larger fight against organized crime and began confiscating machines all over the city, while Chicago, the center of the industry, became the first major city to enact a complete ban on the operation of the machines in 1936, with Los Angeles following suit in 1939. A group of pinball operators subsequently challenged LaGuardia’s actions in court, leading to a major victory for the New York City mayor in 1942 when New York Supreme Court Justice Aaron Levy upheld an earlier ruling from a magistrate that pinball machines were gambling devices and therefore properly subject to seizure. The ruling effectively made the operation of pinball machines illegal in New York City, although they were not formally banned by the city council until 1948. As a result of these actions, pinball manufacturers and operators would be linked with organized crime in the public mind and be forced to wage constant battles over the legality of pinball for more than thirty years.
Even as Pinball evolved features like Flippers, multiball, and reel scoring, it didnt stop the association and it took untill the 1970's for it to finally gain acceptance. The major event that kicked this off was a New York City council meeting where the AMOA recruited one of the top players in the country, GQ Magazine writer Roger Sharpe, to demonstrate it on a machine set up in the Manhattan courtroom to prove Pinball was a game of skill rather than luck.
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