Time Clocks

A time clock is a spring-and-gears timer mounted beneath the playfield of an Electromechanical machine of the 1930s and 1940s, wound and started by the mechanical push of the coin chute that begins a game, which three to five minutes later opens a switch and cuts power to the machine and all its lighting — whether or not a game is still in progress.^[1][2]

What a coin bought on such a machine was therefore an interval rather than a count of balls. The next coin pushed in resets the timer, closes the switch and lights the machine again for play, which makes the timer as much a merchandising device as a mechanism: it ends the transaction on the operator’s schedule.^[3]

The bell housing

The standard timer sits inside a metal bell that has no clapper and never rings, the bell serving only as a protective shell.^[4] The variant that keeps its clapper, and does ring when the time expires, is called a bell timer.^[5] Parts lists of the period carried the assembly under the same name the trade used for the mechanism, illustrated so that it could not be confused with something else.^[6]

Span

PAMCO put one on the playfield of Time in February 1935,^[7] and Rock-ola Manufacturing Corporation fitted them the same year. The flipperless game is the setting the device was made for and where nearly every one of them sits,^[1] but it outlasted that setting: flippered machines carried a time clock too, from 1948 on — Gottlieb’s Buccaneer (1948) and, as late as 1950, Genco’s Canasta — so for a few years the two ways of ending a game, the clock and the ball count, ran side by side on one playfield.