Outholes

The outhole is where a lost ball leaves the playfield — the mouth at the bottom that swallows a drained ball and passes it to the trough beneath.^[1] The word is old, and pinball has used it as a plain synonym for the drain since before Flippers existed.^[2]

On the pin tables of the 1930s and 1940s a game ended when the player’s ten balls were gone, and several makers gave the playfield a pair of outhole troughs rather than a single mouth — O. D. Jennings and Company’s Monarch (1932) and the German Tura and Bera machines of 1933 among them, and Bally’s one-ball games Seabiscuit (1938) and Grand National (1939).^[3] Marvel was still building them that way in 1948.