Flippers

A flipper is a pivoting bat or paddle set into pinball machines’ Playfields and swung by a button on the side of the cabinet, used to knock the ball back up the playfield.

Much of the world considers the flipper to be the game’s defining characteristic. While called “pinball” in English, many countries know the game as “flipper”, including Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway (‘flipperspill’). Spain and Spanish South America use both flipper and pinball, among other terms, depending on where.

The first electric flipper

The universal adoption of the flipper on pinball machines dates from the introduction of the electric flipper, which vastly improved upon its purely mechanical predecessors. The first electrically operated flipper arrived in 1947 on Gottlieb’s Humpty Dumpty,^[1] designed by Harry Mabs.^[2] The impact on the industry was immediate: by the end of that year, most makers in the trade had either built a flipper game or started one.^[3]

Gottlieb announced the machine in the trade paper The Billboard on 1 November 1947.^[4] Inside a month of its reaching locations, a distributor was paying for space in the same paper to thank the firm “for making the greatest improvement in the history of pin games”.^[5]

Humpty Dumpty carried six flippers, in three pairs climbing the playfield, because each bat was too weak on its own to work the ball back toward the top.^[6][7] Gottlieb advertised them to operators as “Player Controlled Flipper Bumpers”.^[8]

Who invented it

Credit for the electric flipper was contested from the start. While the name most commonly associated with inventing it is Gottlieb’s Harry Mabs,
Chicago Coin designer Jerry Koci held a patent of his own on an electric flipper, filed in January 1948 and granted in August 1950 as a pivotal ball return means for pin games,^[9] and maintained that his firm had got there ahead of Gottlieb. By his account he had asked, in mid-1947 while at work on a baseball game, for a bat to go on a pin game; the firm declined, which left the field to Gottlieb.^[10] Bermuda was the machine the firm eventually did put flippers on.^[11]

Harry Williams said in a 1978 interview that Williams had been working on a comparable device at the same time — a shallow hole with a bat behind it that kicked the ball out again. The Williams device fired on its own rather than on a button under the player’s hand, which is precisely the distinction the invention turns on.^[12]

Before the electric flipper

Some purely mechanical flippered pinball machines existed before electricity made flippers universal.

Ad-Lee’s Double-Shuffle (1932) carried eight of them, worked through levers with no power behind them (Mechanical Flippers), and most other early bats were manually operated, one to a playfield, on baseball games.^[13][14] Nor did player control have to mean a bat: Juggle Ball (1932, Rock-ola Manufacturing Corporation) offered player control by other means entirely.^[15]

Even the name was already taken. David Gottlieb wanted to call the 1947 machine Flipper, and a legal check turned up a patented 1932 countertop game with a manual bat, Smith Manufacturing Company’s Flipper, so the nursery rhyme went on the cabinet instead.^[16]

The modern layout

The standard flipper arrangement, with two flippers guarding the center drain at the bottom of the playfield, took three years and three machines to arrive. Genco’s Triple Action, designed by Steve Kordek and in production for ten weeks from January 1948, cut the number down to two and set them at the foot of the playfield, where they have stayed ever since;^[17] they still pointed outward, away from one another. Two Gottlieb games of 1950 turned them inward: Just 21 in January, its pair set wide apart to leave room for a turret shooter in the middle, and then Spot Bowler, whose inward-facing flippers sat close together^[18] — the layout, credited to Wayne Neyens, that the trade eventually settled on.^[19]

Settling took another thirty years. The bats grew: Williams’ Hayburners II carried the first three-inch flippers in 1968, and three inches was standard across the industry by the end of the 1970s.^[20] The bottom of the playfield converged too, on the symmetrical arrangement the trade calls an Italian bottom — a flipper on each side, flanked by Outlanes and Inlanes — which was standard by the middle of the 1980s.^[21]

Skill and the law

The flipper has often been the legal boundary between a game of skill and a game of chance (i.e., gambling).

The California Supreme Court found in 1974 that flipper games did involve an element of skill,^[22] and in 1976 Roger Sharpe demonstrated as much before the city council in New York, which lifted a ban held there for decades.^[23] A Flipperless machine had no such case to make: with nothing on the playfield for the player to work, where the ball went was random.^[24]