The original collector

[pennymachines]

Alden Scott Boyer was a Chicago chemist with the remarkable foresight to collect coin-operated machines and associated literature and set up a museum dedicated to them in the 1930s!

Literature Discovery From America's First Coin-Op Museum (PDF)

12 Boyer Coin Op Museum.pdf

(1.31 MiB) Downloaded 2 times

[badpenny]

Fascinating stuff.
You never see a Chicken Vendor then they come at you in droves.
Kind of makes you wonder what the hell you've been doing for the last 45 years.
Seems I've been wasting my time with RotaLottaMintaMats and Olly Bryans Bumper-Thumpers, when I could have become CEO of a Chemists.

[clubconsoles]

That's great.
Makes you think of what will become of all the 30-40 year old machines that have survived!
Ever so slowly becoming collectable and not worth a great deal but a precious few have a soft spot for the old EMs.
Also 1970s Bell Fruit with cams and timers are becoming harder to come by and I remember regularly seeing them at the tip in the 1980s and 90s.
Ballys seem fairly plentiful and not worth a great deal unless they have special features.
The early MPU stuff really has an ardent following.
They have there very own site called MPU mecca of which I'm also a member so I may do a link to the 1930s collector article.
It's astonishing to think that MPU slots from the early '80s can often command north of £500 now (allwin Prices)!!!

[john t peterson]

I am opening the SECOND Coin-OP Museum in my garage here in Bristol, Tennessee. I am requesting that any rare and exotic machines you have lying around not doing anything be sent to me. In return, I will send you a very nice thank-you note and put a small card on your donated item with your name semi-prominently displayed in small gothic type.

Thank you for your overwhelming participation.

J Peterson
American Curator and Huckster

[pennymachines]

Perhaps less surprising that someone in England was collecting tobacco vending honour boxes around the same time:

An English antiquarian when told about the discovery of coin operated machines merely interrupted and became so extraordinarily English and said he knew all about it— he would. However, this man really did know something, for he had a collec­tion of tobacco boxes which included some of the kind that were used in the English inns and taverns nearly two hundred years ago. Many of them are quite cute. They are all jars, some fitted with a slot into which a penny was pushed and by giving a hard knock on a small knob near the slot, a lid opened and the “customer” helped himself to a tiny packet of tobacco.

From what was seen of this collec­tion of tobacco jars and pocket baccy boxes, perhaps some people may be soon using up some of their surplus income on similar pots and boxes. They had never seen one of the penny-in-slot kind before, but they have seen a number of pottery ones, some of them not unlike the Toby jugs.

If there are any of the slot-machine kind in the country they would be just the kind of things the early tav­ern keepers would have sent out from England.

New York Sun, 1935.

"A penny inserted in the slot would open the lid into the box where the smoker dipped his pipe. As simple as this was, it was clever enough to permit half-penny pieces to go through the slot without permitting the would-be cheat to get at the tobacco". Automatic Age, 1939.

[pennymachines]

You never see a Chicken Vendor then they come at you in droves.

Chickens come in broods and eggs in clutches, but surely the collective noun for antique chicken vendors is a pride? Curious that it says it vended boiled eggs, not lithographed tin eggs with chocolate inside.