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- description
- A time clock is a spring-and-gears timer mounted beneath the playfield of an [[technology-generation: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 *[[title:time]]* in February 1935,[7] and [[manufacturer: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 — [[manufacturer:gottlieb]]'s *[[title:buccaneer]]* (1948) and, as late as 1950, [[manufacturer:genco]]'s *[[title: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.
1. Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) — https://www.ipdb.org/glossary.php Archive A device found under the playfields of many flipperless games consisting of a spring-and-gears timing mechanism. This timer was wound up and initiated by the mechanical action of the player pushing the coin chute to start a game.
2. Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) — https://www.ipdb.org/glossary.php Archive Usually 3 to 5 minutes later, the timer would finish by opening a switch to kill power to the game and all of its illumination whether the player had a game in progress or not.
3. Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) — https://www.ipdb.org/glossary.php Archive When a player inserts a next coin into the chute and pushes it in to start a new game, it resets the timer, closes the switch, and lights up the game for play.
4. Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) — https://www.ipdb.org/glossary.php Archive The timer found standard in many flipperless games is housed inside a metal bell yet it has no clapper and the bell does not ring. The bell serves only as a protective housing for this timer.
6. Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) — https://www.ipdb.org/glossary.php Archive This timer may be listed in parts catalogs of the day as a time clock or a time clock assembly and will have a picture with it so that the term is not confused to mean some other device.
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- name
- Time Clocks
- slug
- time-clocks
- status
- active