Bell Products Company

Bell Products Company was a short-lived Chicago manufacturer active during the middle years of World War II, with a known pinball catalog of eight Electromechanical games from 1943 to 1945. Titles such as Sportsman, War Admiral, Flying Tigers, Pin Up Girl, Sky Rider, and Casablanca make the company’s identity immediately clear: Bell specialized in wartime conversion games, reworking earlier Bally machines into new tables with fresh artwork, new themes, and renewed operator appeal.

That business model places Bell squarely within one of the most characteristic niches of the 1940s coin-machine trade. Its games were flipperless, topical, and commercially pragmatic, using familiar underlying hardware while speaking directly to the patriotic mood of the period. Bell did not survive long enough to become a major independent line builder, but its small output is historically valuable precisely because it shows how Chicago manufacturers kept machines earning during the war by turning yesterday’s cabinets into today’s headlines.