- credit
- Arthur L. Paulin — Design
- credit
- Earl Froom — Design
- ipdb.corporate_entity_name
- Automatic Industries, Incorporated
- ipdb_id
- 3552
- ipdb.image_urls
- ["https://www.ipdb.org/images/3552/image-1.jpg","https://www.ipdb.org/images/3552/image-2.jpg","https://www.ipdb.org/images/3552/image-3.jpg","https://www.ipdb.org/images/3552/image-4.png"]
- ipdb.marketing_slogans
- "Everybody's Game"
- ipdb.notable_features
- Glass playfield cover, ball elevator, coin mechanism.
Game uses 10 balls which are agate marbles about 1/2 inch in diameter, nine white and one red, the red marble counting double.
- ipdb.notes
- In converting Arthur L. Paulin's bagatelle design to an automatic coin-operated device, salesman Earl Froom solved a number of issues, including how to separate the player from the playfield (glass), how to recirculate the balls after play (playfield baffle/shuttle and ball elevator), and how to collect money (coin mechanism). What resulted was a game of such wild popularity in the United States that it caught the coin-op world by surprise and caused innumerable imitations by other companies, leading into the pinball patent wars.
We don't know how many of these games were made, but The Encyclopedia of Pinball, Volume 1, page 29 quotes Earl Froom as saying, "We built 27,000 Whiffle games the first year" in his lament that his game became, as author Dick Bueschel put it, "instantly obsolete" in the face of competition from the very successful Bally's 1932 'Ballyhoo' of which approximately 50,000 units were produced.
Whiffle is the game most often associated with the birth of pinball, but according to the Encyclopedia of Pinball Vol 1, the first true pinball was Charles P. Young's "Coin Game Board" trade stimulator of 1892, which was also glass-covered and coin-operated. The idea to add coin mechanisms to machines came even earlier, from British inventor Percival Everett, but it was Londoner Henry John Gerrard Pessers who was first to put a coin slot on a marble game, patented September 29, 1889.
For Automatic Industries' predecessor to this game, see Yohio Mfg.'s 1931 'Old Jenny (Whiffle)'.
- month
- 6
- player_count
- 1
- technology_generation
- pure-mechanical
- year
- 1931