Patent Research

[sweetmeats]

I can now add the English patent numbers for the Twister: 20115 (1890), Gripper (1890), Cricketer: 14484 (1899) and to complete the cast iron machines, Two Player Footballer: 9731 (1896), Yacht Racer Mermaid: 19812 (1900) , Six Man Footballer: 2862 (1903). I suspect the Golfer is a variation of this patent. Also, the Doughy and Barrett race game: 1322 (1896). My Twister is 20660 and is dated 18/12/1890, so nine days newer than the Barrett which is 9/12/1890. After a little time and a few dead ends I have found the patent for the Shooter. It is patented to a Mr Cummings: 18830 in November 1890.

[pennymachines]

Great work Sweetmeats.

The British format for these early patents is GB+YEAR+FIVE DIGIT PATENT NUMBER, so the Twister should be GB189020115. Unfortunately it's not currently in the Espacenet database (or any other online resource). The US patent US453729 is there, but it's a year later and there is reference to three Canadian coin-freed dynamometer patents by Charles Arthur Barrett: CA41083, CA39419 and CA39418, all dated 1892.

The Cricketer is GB189914484 (already listed in Archive/Patents). For the Two Man Footballer, you have to prefix a zero to the patent number to get five digits: GB189609731 (already listed). The Yatch Racer is GB190019812 (already listed). The Six Man Footballer comes out as GB190302862 and the Doughty & Barrett Racer is GB189601322 (already listed).

Gamewat has fed me a bunch of new patents he's found which I'll post here for now, before putting them in the Archive:

Bowler rifle game: GB363373 1931

Gold changer: US 428514

Everett automatic vending: US 374297 1887

This is an interesting one to add payout to Mills punch bags by Sweetmeat Automatic: US 900126 1908

Another classic: US 621440 1899

And the Double Myers Racer: US 2148828 1936

Scottish target shooter patent (already listed but no link): US 1456191 1923

[gameswat]

Thanks Sweetmeats, here is the US patent for the Barrett Pistol: US 469127
Now I can retire!

[pennymachines]

Brilliant!
But before you settle into your well-earned retirement, how about this one?

My Twister is 20660 and is dated 18/12/1890

And here's some random stuff I found:

GB307095 1929, Greyhound Racing Track, Alfred Leonard Walton

GB173135 1929, Punch Ball improvements, Charles Ahrens

GB323775 1930, Ball game with figures, Avigdor Finkelstein

GB358602 1931, Target game, W A McCurd

GB364632 1932, Miniature Golf, Arthur Egerton Brookes

GB391169 1933, Improvements in 'fruit machines' etc., Gordon Smith

GB413893 1934, Coin-freed billiards, Nicolas Godestar

GB407076 1934, Spinning aeroplane game, William Ebenezer Sparks

GB431643 1935, Striker, Frank James Ralph

GB424023 1935, Coin rolling skill game, Highwebb Company Ltd.

GB425625 1935, Ball rolling game, Mary Christina Myler

GB425237 1935, Coin-freed billiards, Joseph Frederick Horton & Charles Thomas Davis

GB443174 1936, Aerial bomber, Brecknell Munro & Rogers

GB474440 1937, Betting game (French), Marcel Adrien Deborne

[gameswat]

It would help if Sweetmeats tells us the name of the patentee, otherwise I could be quite some time at the computer....

[pennymachines]

Just spoken to him and he's sending details anon.

[gameswat]

PM, cool, that biplane bombing game is amazing! That machine would be a killer find and with such detailed drawings looks likely it did actually exist.

One of the interesting facts of this research is that quite often the Patent was just a sketchy idea existing only on paper when first Registered, to help obtain investors for actual production I imagine. So sometimes the Patent doesn't really match up well with the surviving machinery because when it came to prototypes they quickly found that things didn't work the way they originally planned them! But thankfully more often than not the companies waited until they had a workable machine before investing in the Patents. But no matter what, any Patents and Registered design info you can find for a machine is a wealth of important and factual information.

[sweetmeats]

Post copied from Barrett Test Your Twist Site Admin.

Here is a picture of my twister and the English patent also added (see below). You can see the original idea was to incorporate an advert and give a cigar for maximum twist.

[bob]

Post copied from British/Australian Rifle Ranges Site Admin.

The Electric Pistol that I had is as Rory says a version of the Electric Rifle/Pistol patent machine that was modified to show the result on a target mounted on the machine rather than the target mounted some distance away. This eliminated the need for expensive to replace multi stranded cables that were very vulnerable, a fault perpetuated years later by the Seeburg rifle machines. However the original patent is Thomas Linforth Jones British patent no 7733 of 11th May 1905 not 1901.

[gameswat]

Post copied from British/Australian Rifle Ranges Site Admin.

Here is the link to partial patent for the 1905 Auto-Electric Rifle: GB190507733

And full patent attached.

[bob]

Absolutely Sterling work by Sweetmeats, Gameswat and Mr Pennymachines in finding the patents for the Twist Your Grip, Try Your Grip and the Automatic Shooting Range. No wonder I could never find these patents when searching for them years ago as they were commonly stated to be Matthewson machines and that is what I searched for them as. It's great to have established who really invented and made these machines.
Other mysteries still remain to be cleared up regarding the Matthewson machines however. There is no patent for the Golf machine, most likely as Sweetmeats says, the mechanism is based on Matthewson's Football machine. However I wonder if he originally intended to design something that worked differently. Golf machines found here in Australia had a Directions plate which had no relation to the way in which the game worked (see Matthewson's incorrect Golf plate photo). Instead they all work in accordance with a later Matthewson plate and the Rowland's Golf plate which is found on the machines that have turned up in the UK. Perhaps Matthewson got the plates made in advance for what he hoped to accomplish and still used them inadvertently or perhaps he just gave the wrong instructions to the plate maker.
Little is also known about where Rowland fits into the picture. Some of this was cleared up by Bolland but his memory was astray and he also added some misconceptions to the Matthewson story. He told Jon Gresham and others that Matthewson had used a recycled aquarium as the pattern for the Yacht Race machine. I was able to scuttle this by finding the design patents for the Matthewson machines including the Yacht Race, Cricket and Football in 1988 after an incredibly tortuous search for the British design patents. These design patents are Cricket No 377195 of 1901, Mermaid Yacht Race 399522 of 1902 and wooden cased Football machine 572441 oddly taken out in 1910 when the machine was patented in 1896. One of these wooden cased Football machines exists in Australia having been brought here by a British collector some years ago.
Strangely enough I found a zinc version of the cast iron base of the mermaid machines in a country antique shop many years ago for sale for $A800 about 400 pounds. The owner of the shop was a Belgian man who imported container loads of antiques from France and Belgium. This would figure as to my knowledge zinc was not usually used in British coin op machines, but was used in coin op machines made in France, eg the chicken egg laying and negro vending machines, the electric shocker pig etc. When I went back to the shop I was told that a local lady had bought it to use in her bathroom??? Shortly after the shop disappeared so that I never got to speak to the owner about the zinc mermaid base's origins.
Further interesting concerns about Matthewson's machines relate to two more of his coin op machines, which, to my knowledge no copies of still exist anywhere. One is a very early one, British Patent No 19, 243 of 30th September 1893 for improvements in Coin or the like Operated Apparatus for Testing the Force of a Blow, a fascinating machine which is really a coin operated version of the well known Fairground Striker which fires the coin up to a bell. The other is a much later patent British Patent no 196,650 of April 23 1923 a relatively simple machine which he called Police. Does any trace of these machines exist beside the patents?

[gameswat]

Topic merged - Site Admin.

Researching something else and just came upon a US Design Patent by Solomon Shefras dating 1929 that looks very close to this classic Tivoli as pictured in the Paul Braithwaite Arcades book page 5.
US D82227

And just added these pics of a Shefras Tivoli token I found which would confirm they probably did make this machine.

14546.jpg (4.21 KiB) Viewed 5818 times

14547.jpg (4.69 KiB) Viewed 5818 times

[pennymachines]

Very interesting Gameswat, not least because I currently own the machine above. There's a bit of a mystery here, because the British coin-op inventor, EC Bignell (who resided in Paris) filed a patent around the same time for an identical game: GB332881.

What's more, there is another version of the machine, which I suspected was French-made because it is so much more decorative. The one below came up for sale in the States a few years ago and there's another pictured on page 61 of Arcadia Slot Machines of Europe & America. Baudot says it's British, "possibly Chubbs Automatics", but doesn't say why he thinks that.

Disappointingly, the only Solomon Shefras patent in the European database is GB324474 for a 1930s towel dispenser and a 1933 German patent for an "automatic cash processing dynamometer" (presumably the famous Shefras punch bag machine): DE543244. Just to throw us off, it's listed as "SALOMON SHEFRAS".

[pennymachines]

By the way - I'm thinking it might make more sense to create another Forum category for patent research, so different lines of enquiry don't get mixed up. What think you folk?

[badpenny]

I'd patent that idea Mr. P.

[gameswat]

Looks like Shefras might have ripped Bignell off!

[pennymachines]

Sweetmeats gave me some patent numbers to chase up. Some are probably already listed.

GB190010614 Pessers, Pickwick type

GB190023431 Pessers, Pickwick type

GB189919610 Pessers, tivoli type

GB190120838 Ell, Crackshot

GB190813722 Ell, Skittles

GB19128005 Matthweson, artillery

GB190019196 Haydon & Urry, Barrels

GB189421756 Haydon & Urry, Barrels

GB109488 Jofeh, tivoli billiards (Domino)

GB191406789 Flory, Handan Ni 4 ball Lion head catcher

GB190201196 Jofeh, Spirometer

GB189808338 kinetoscope

GB189901572 Mutoscope

GB190318478 Force testing

GB173135 Ahrens, improvements to force testing

GB189923815 Humphris, original version of Smithy

No 8796 of 1893, Robbins cast iron target shooter: Not Found

And some others I found while researching Shefras:

US2079000 US patent for Bernard Brenner/Philip Shefras Multiplay bandit

GB1151426 Morris Shefras coin validator

GB1140302 Morris Shefras escalator substitute

GB1181452 Morris Shefras bingo machine (not coin-op).

DE543244 German patent for Solomon Shefras Punchball

[pennymachines]

Above now copied to Archive/Patents.

[pennymachines]

Sweetmeats recently purchased some printed patents of early coin machines and kindly gave me the numbers to look up at Espacenet.com.

The first one, GB189811824 Tug of War, George Edward Tate & Walter Henry Godfrey, 1899, was already in our archive, but I've added the others to the Patents database.

Most weird and wonderful is PAT. No. GB190015882, Beverage (and tuberculosis) vending spirometer, Arthur Samuel Williams, 1901.

PAT. No. GB190015882 Prize vending shooting game, Edward Geisler Herbert, 1900

PAT. No. GB190015882 Tivoli/Bagatelle type, Charles Hermann Muller (New Polyphon Supply), 1900

PAT. No. GB190015882 Tivoli/Bagatelle type, Charles Hermann Muller (New Polyphon Supply), 1900

PAT. No. GB190015882 Skill game with balls on roulette-like table, Harry Geen Bucknell, 1899

PAT. No. GB190015882 Coin-freed racing game, Charles Middlebrook, 1900

[lastcenturygames]

Hello all, long time without post in this excellent forum for my side (linked to my French collection )

My contribution for the French patents with a lot of famous French slot machine description updated on my website : http://lastcenturygames.free.fr/Documen ... revet.html
I'll updated it when I'll found others in the French administration INPI website. The main problem is that the patents are not avaliable from 1857 to 1901 and we don't have the description for the end of 19th century.
I updated on my website some new pictures of French slot with their mechanisms. I try to create a new page on my website with documents linked to this French production (postcard, invoice, advertising, etc), if you have tell me in goal to share worldwide, thanks
Take care
Philippe