Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? So? For the last several years, I've been
Speaker 1: playing a game that's a computer game that's been an
Speaker 1: alpha build for like nearly a decade. In fact, the
Speaker 1: first build was released in twenty thirteen, and the developers
Speaker 1: still give the game the alpha designation and it's still
Speaker 1: in the alpha build. It hasn't even entered beta testing yet.
Speaker 1: This is the survival crafting game the zombie game called
Speaker 1: Seven Days to Die, So, as you would imagine, you're
Speaker 1: a survivor in a zombie apocalypse and you have to
Speaker 1: cobble together a way to survive and perhaps even thrive
Speaker 1: in a world where every seven days, hordes of zombies
Speaker 1: run straight at you, no matter where you're high. They
Speaker 1: know exactly where you are, and they move super fast
Speaker 1: to come and get you anyway. One of the important
Speaker 1: things in that game is that there are vending machines
Speaker 1: where you can purchase food and drinks and medications that
Speaker 1: will help you survive. I have no idea who in
Speaker 1: the game is restocking all those vending machines. I mean,
Speaker 1: some of them are located where there are traders, like
Speaker 1: as in people who trade, but there are other vending machines.
Speaker 1: You'll just find random buildings and they still seem to
Speaker 1: have a stock and they work. So that's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: But it got me to thinking I should do an
Speaker 1: episode about sort of the history of vending machines. They
Speaker 1: have been around for a really long time, and it's
Speaker 1: a clever way to offer a scaled down shopping experience
Speaker 1: without having to mind the store all day. You can
Speaker 1: even design your machine in such a way that it
Speaker 1: attracts people and acts like a salesperson and you don't
Speaker 1: have to pay them. So today we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about the history and a little bit about the technology
Speaker 1: of vending machines, and that history stretches back further than
Speaker 1: you might think, unless you've looked into this before, in
Speaker 1: which case you know where I'm going. So you might
Speaker 1: think about visions of like automats in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: and you know old cigarette machines prior to nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: seven here in the United States, where they were made
Speaker 1: illegal out of the concern that you know, people under
Speaker 1: age could just purchase cigarettes by putting enough money in
Speaker 1: there and pulling a lever. But we actually have to
Speaker 1: go much further back, all the way back to the
Speaker 1: first century of the common era in Egypt, specifically in
Speaker 1: the city Alexandria. So in that city was a dude
Speaker 1: named Hero or Huron sometimes. But Hero was kind of
Speaker 1: a tinkerer and a thinker. He was an engineer and
Speaker 1: an inventor. He experimented with all sorts of clever and
Speaker 1: sometimes danger devices, and among his gadgets and gizmos of
Speaker 1: plenty was the very first vending machine that we are
Speaker 1: aware of. I mean, maybe someone made one before Hero did,
Speaker 1: but this is the first one on record, because who knows.
Speaker 1: People didn't write everything down. But Hero's invention is one
Speaker 1: that we do know of what. We don't know whether
Speaker 1: or not he actually ever built it, but we know
Speaker 1: he designed it. And it was a pretty simple idea
Speaker 1: when you get down to it. Now. When one would
Speaker 1: go and visit a holy temple back in those days,
Speaker 1: one was expected to wash one's hands in holy water,
Speaker 1: and Hero came up with a way to dispense holy
Speaker 1: water while also earning money for the temple. He designed
Speaker 1: a holy water dispenser, a holy water vending machine. That
Speaker 1: is a wild thing to say, but here's how it worked.
Speaker 1: The dispenser, which looked kind of like a big urn
Speaker 1: in the drawings I've seen, had a spiggot that was
Speaker 1: toward the bottom, so that's obviously where the water would
Speaker 1: come out, and the dispenser would obviously hold the holy
Speaker 1: water inside it. There was a valve on the inside
Speaker 1: of this device that, when it was shut, would keep
Speaker 1: the spigot closed, and if the worshiper were to PLoP
Speaker 1: a coin into a slot in the top of the machine,
Speaker 1: the coin would fall inside the machine and it would
Speaker 1: land on a pan that was near the coin slot.
Speaker 1: That pan was actually at the other end of a lever.
Speaker 1: This lever would then be attached to a pivot point,
Speaker 1: and on the other side of the pivot point the fulcrum.
Speaker 1: In other words, on the other side of the fulcrum,
Speaker 1: it had a connection to that valve. So if you
Speaker 1: were to press down on the pan inside this machine,
Speaker 1: it would cause the lever on the valve side to
Speaker 1: go up and thus open the valve and allow water
Speaker 1: to flow through the spigot. The weight of the coin
Speaker 1: was all it would take. The coin would hit this pan.
Speaker 1: That would add weight to the pan. The pan would
Speaker 1: start to tilt downward, the valve side would go up,
Speaker 1: water would come out. Now, Hero actually was fairly clever,
Speaker 1: Not just fairly, he was extremely clever on how much
Speaker 1: water would actually dribble out per coin, Like, how do
Speaker 1: you keep that to a specific amount or at least
Speaker 1: a general amount. Well, the weight of the coin would
Speaker 1: be enough for the pan to start going down, but
Speaker 1: it would just keep going down until it would reach
Speaker 1: a steep enough angle where the coin would slide off
Speaker 1: the pan and land in another little coin bucket that's
Speaker 1: inside this urn, you know, presumably held above the the
Speaker 1: container of water. Now with a coin slid free of
Speaker 1: the pan, now the pan's no longer heavy enough to
Speaker 1: hold down the lever. It tilts back up. The valve
Speaker 1: side comes down, which means the valve closes again and
Speaker 1: it shuts off the water. Your water dispensation is complete.
Speaker 1: You now have the holy water needed to wash your
Speaker 1: hands and go and you know, worship whichever god the
Speaker 1: temple was devoted to. Again, I don't know if Hero
Speaker 1: ever actually built this device, but he definitely described it.
Speaker 1: He had a work that loosely translated means mechanics and optics,
Speaker 1: and he described it within that work, and there's no
Speaker 1: reason it couldn't work. There's no reason he couldn't have
Speaker 1: built it. It was based off of very simple mechanism.
Speaker 1: Now you would have to get the weights just right
Speaker 1: for the lever and to minimize the chance of a coin,
Speaker 1: you know, just hitting the pan and rolling off and
Speaker 1: then nothing happens, although I guess you could always blame
Speaker 1: it on the fickle gods at that point. There also
Speaker 1: would have been no way for the machine to differentiate
Speaker 1: coins or exactly what had pressed down on that plate. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if you were to somehow fit something
Speaker 1: that could go into that slot and push down on
Speaker 1: that pan, then you could get your holy water and
Speaker 1: not spend a coin doing it. So you could use
Speaker 1: like a dummy coin, you know, the old slug routine,
Speaker 1: as they would call it, a slug to represent a coin,
Speaker 1: and you could get a blast of holy water for free.
Speaker 1: Although that doesn't seem like it's really keeping in spirit
Speaker 1: with the purpose of the machine. But you know, it's
Speaker 1: also weird to make holy water dispensation a transactional process
Speaker 1: in the first place. If you ask me, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm not very religious, so it's hard for me to
Speaker 1: even say. Anyway, as a design, Hero's machine was pretty
Speaker 1: darn neat. It might not have been too practical, however,
Speaker 1: because coins were not uniform in weight or roundness. They
Speaker 1: were not even in broad circulation at the time, so
Speaker 1: it wasn't even necessarily likely that the worshippers would even
Speaker 1: have coins on them. But it does show Hero's ingenuity,
Speaker 1: and it would be the for vending machines. It's just
Speaker 1: that it would take some time before you would get
Speaker 1: to another one. So we enter into a bit of
Speaker 1: a dry spell, not just because we're no longer talking
Speaker 1: about holy water. It's not like Hero came up with
Speaker 1: this invention and then next thing you know, you know,
Speaker 1: you had vending machines throughout the ancient and medieval world
Speaker 1: that would to spend stuff like garum and olive, zenda
Speaker 1: and hummus and you know, chainmail, like you didn't have
Speaker 1: those all over the place. It would take more than
Speaker 1: a thousand years actually, before we would start getting into
Speaker 1: descriptions of devices that we might group together in the
Speaker 1: family of vending machines. So next up, based on lots
Speaker 1: of different accounts. By the way, it's really hard to
Speaker 1: track down good, definitive sources for this. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of sources that all echo the same points, but
Speaker 1: it feels like they're all kind of drawing from each
Speaker 1: other as opposed to, you know, finding a really good
Speaker 1: historian who has really done the work here. But there
Speaker 1: are historical accounts in various documents and things like patent filings,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing where we can trace sort of
Speaker 1: a development. But the next one is one that's a
Speaker 1: little it's not quite a vending machine as we would
Speaker 1: think of it. It's not like it's fully automated. And
Speaker 1: also it was portable. And another thing that's interesting is
Speaker 1: that our first vending machine dispensed holy water, so it's
Speaker 1: only fitting that the second vending machine dispenses tobacco. It's snuff.
Speaker 1: So at this point we're in England and we're in
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds, so seventeenth century, and there were these
Speaker 1: devices that some pubs had that were known as honesty boxes,
Speaker 1: and this would be in jolly Old England, and patrons
Speaker 1: of this pub could purchase a pinch of snuff or tobacco,
Speaker 1: and what they would do is they would flag down
Speaker 1: a bartender or server who would bring around this, you know,
Speaker 1: a fairly sizable brass box. The top of the box
Speaker 1: was a pair of hinged lids, so think of like
Speaker 1: a hinge in the center and either end of the
Speaker 1: box opens for half of the box. So you had
Speaker 1: two compartments inside the box, one under each lid. So
Speaker 1: one compartment would serve as the coin receptacle, which would
Speaker 1: be locked in place. Obviously, you don't want patrons getting
Speaker 1: into that and getting their grubby little hands and all
Speaker 1: the coins you've been selecting. The other box was what
Speaker 1: would now hold the tobacco. So on top of these
Speaker 1: boxes there would be a coin slot and a plunger,
Speaker 1: so you would put a haypenny a halfpenny in the slot,
Speaker 1: and when you push the plunger down, that would allow
Speaker 1: the coin to slide into the box, into the receptacle,
Speaker 1: and at the same time that also allowed a mechanism
Speaker 1: inside the box to shift and unlatch the hinged lid
Speaker 1: that was on top of the tobacco or snuff or whatever.
Speaker 1: So you put a coin in, you push the plunger
Speaker 1: down and then the side with the tobacco in it
Speaker 1: unlatches and the little lid pops up, so you can
Speaker 1: take a pinch of tobacco or snuff, only a pinch.
Speaker 1: That's what you were supposed to do. That's why they
Speaker 1: were called honesty boxes, so it was kind of on
Speaker 1: the honor system, although you would also typically have like
Speaker 1: a bartender or server watching your every move to make
Speaker 1: sure you weren't like stealing all the tobacco for just
Speaker 1: a haypenny. And then once done, the bar employee would
Speaker 1: push down on the lid on the tobacco side and
Speaker 1: it would latch back into place and it be ready
Speaker 1: for the next coin. Like Heroes Invention, this one was
Speaker 1: purely mechanical, and y'all, it took me a while to
Speaker 1: search around and find information on one of these. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of sources that mention them, but again
Speaker 1: they're all pretty much the same. However, I did track
Speaker 1: down and antiques site that actually had some examples of
Speaker 1: honesty boxes and including photographs of them, so I could
Speaker 1: actually take a good look at pictures of these things.
Speaker 1: So I can't go into great detail about the mechanisms
Speaker 1: because it wasn't like they were detailing that, but I
Speaker 1: get the general idea that pushing down that plunger and
Speaker 1: allowing the coin to go through activated the mechanism that
Speaker 1: unlatched the other lid, and without a coin, the plunger
Speaker 1: would not go down all the way, so it would
Speaker 1: keep the tobaccos safe from unsavory types who were just
Speaker 1: pretending to put a haypenny in. Okay, we're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break. When we come back, I'm going
Speaker 1: to talk about a trouble maker and a free thinker
Speaker 1: and a radical who believed, get this, that all human
Speaker 1: beings should have the same rights, and why he's associated
Speaker 1: with vending machines. But first, let's take a quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: I promised y'all the story of a radical, someone who
Speaker 1: thought that everyone should have the same rights, whether they
Speaker 1: happened to be male or female. I assume back in
Speaker 1: those days that he did not recognize the concept of
Speaker 1: non binary, but still for the time, it was rather
Speaker 1: radical and for the place as well. We are talking
Speaker 1: about Robert Carlyle c R L I L E. Because
Speaker 1: I don't want you to get him mixed up with
Speaker 1: the character who is in Downton Abbey as a very
Speaker 1: different character, although both of them were in the print business. Anyway,
Speaker 1: English authorities viewed Robert Carlyle as being dangerous or at
Speaker 1: the very least a real nuisance, a thorn in their side.
Speaker 1: And that's because, like I said, Carlisle was promoting these
Speaker 1: dangerous ideas like women are human beings and therefore they
Speaker 1: should have the same rights the men do, or that
Speaker 1: the average poor person has just as many rights as
Speaker 1: someone of the English nobility. These were not the sorts
Speaker 1: of ideas and philosophies that the English authorities cared for,
Speaker 1: but they are the ones that Carlisle believed in. And
Speaker 1: he opened a bookshop that sold books and pamphlets about
Speaker 1: these things and kind of spread and promoted these ideas
Speaker 1: that the English government viewed as radical. So the government
Speaker 1: was not keen on this at all, and they had
Speaker 1: put into place some rather restrictive censorship laws. So if
Speaker 1: you were found selling books about you know, this illegal
Speaker 1: material and promoted these ideas that the government found distasteful
Speaker 1: and disruptive, then you could be investigated and carted off
Speaker 1: to jail. And Carlisle actually did get carted off to
Speaker 1: jail a couple of times. His wife did too, in fact,
Speaker 1: because she took up his cause while her husband was
Speaker 1: in prison. That this meant that their baby spent some
Speaker 1: time in the houscal because she was pregnant when she
Speaker 1: was arrested, and then delivered her baby while in prison.
Speaker 1: So Yauza. So Carlisle thought he had come up with
Speaker 1: a fairly clever workaround for these British censorship laws that said,
Speaker 1: you know, it was illegal to sell this material to customers.
Speaker 1: I don't know that the material itself was illegal, but
Speaker 1: the act of selling it was. So he commissioned a
Speaker 1: machine that would dispense books, a book vending machine. I
Speaker 1: wish I could tell you how this machine worked, but
Speaker 1: I could not dig up a description of the actual mechanisms,
Speaker 1: if in fact there were any, But I do know
Speaker 1: it worked from the point of the view of the customer.
Speaker 1: So the idea is that you would walk up to
Speaker 1: this machine, and the machine had a face on it,
Speaker 1: kind of like a clock face with a dial in
Speaker 1: the center as opposed to you know, hands of a clock,
Speaker 1: and around the clockface would be titles of banned books,
Speaker 1: and you could then turn the dial to the title
Speaker 1: of the work that you were interested in. You would
Speaker 1: PLoP in the appropriate coins into the coin slot, and
Speaker 1: the machine would release a copy of the illegal material
Speaker 1: into your hot little hands. And no human had actually
Speaker 1: overseen the transaction, so thought Carlyle he had a loophole.
Speaker 1: No one had actually sold the illegal material. It was
Speaker 1: dispensed by a machine. The British authorities weren't having any
Speaker 1: of it. While the history of English law has no
Speaker 1: shortage of examples where someone was, on a technicality, able
Speaker 1: to prove that they had only violated the spirit but
Speaker 1: not the letter of the law, in Carlisle's case that
Speaker 1: ended up being a non starter. The authorities agreed that
Speaker 1: no human had sold the book at the moment of exchange,
Speaker 1: but they still would hold whomever loaded the machine with
Speaker 1: copies of the works responsible for the sale. Carlisle didn't
Speaker 1: give up on his support for freedom of the press
Speaker 1: and equal rights, but he would pay for it time
Speaker 1: and again with various stints in jail. And there's also,
Speaker 1: you know, so little information on Carlisle's machine other than
Speaker 1: the fact that it existed, that it's entirely possible it
Speaker 1: was not automated at all. Instead, I mean, it's possible
Speaker 1: it could have been essentially a mechanical turk. You might
Speaker 1: remember the story of the mechanical Turk. A clever inventor
Speaker 1: slash magician created this device that looked like it was
Speaker 1: an automaton, but in fact was a gadget that was
Speaker 1: puppeteered by someone who was hiding inside the workings of
Speaker 1: the machine but was hidden from view, and so in
Speaker 1: fact it wasn't an automated machine at all. It was
Speaker 1: something that was under the control of a person. It's
Speaker 1: possible that the same thing was going on with Carlisle's
Speaker 1: quote unquote machine. That maybe there was just an employee
Speaker 1: who paid attention to the dials setting and then upon
Speaker 1: receiving the money, would just slide a book down a chute,
Speaker 1: and so it was just the appearance of a vending machine.
Speaker 1: That's possible. I don't know the answer one way or
Speaker 1: the other. All that being said, if you were to
Speaker 1: flip ahead a century or so, because this was happening
Speaker 1: in the in the nineteenth century, the mid nineteenth century
Speaker 1: with Carlisle's book, that's how late those censorship laws were
Speaker 1: taking effect. Well, if you were to go to the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, then into the twenty first century, you would
Speaker 1: find the biblio Matt. This is a vending machine, a
Speaker 1: book vending machine that you can find in a bookstore
Speaker 1: that's in Toronto, Canada. The bookstore is called the Monkey's
Speaker 1: Paw and for the princely sum of a touney. A
Speaker 1: toney is a two dollars Canadian coin. You can PLoP
Speaker 1: a tuney in and out will come one of as
Speaker 1: the machine proclaims, one hundred and twelve million titles, which
Speaker 1: is very clever. Obviously, whatever is going to come out
Speaker 1: is what has been loaded into the machine for that day.
Speaker 1: But you know the joke being it could be anything
Speaker 1: out of any of the books that have been published.
Speaker 1: So what actually comes out is not up to you.
Speaker 1: You don't get to choose. You just get whatever is next.
Speaker 1: So you could end up with a really odd book.
Speaker 1: You could end up with a rare edition of a book.
Speaker 1: Some cases, maybe it's a biography about Lawrence Welk. The
Speaker 1: owner of the shop loads the machine up with all
Speaker 1: sorts of odds and ends. There's actually a great little
Speaker 1: video on Vimeo showing the bibliomat in action. The added
Speaker 1: bonus is that It also has Tom Waits's song Step
Speaker 1: Right Up as part of the soundtrack, which is awesome.
Speaker 1: The device itself is really clever. When it's activatd some
Speaker 1: shelves inside the machine that are on a little pulley
Speaker 1: system will move, so they get lifted up into place,
Speaker 1: and in the process the shelves they can tilt, so
Speaker 1: when they're pulled up far enough, the lip of the
Speaker 1: shelf will catch in the machine and it will start
Speaker 1: to tilt, and it tilts enough so that whatever volume
Speaker 1: is on top will slide off and go down the
Speaker 1: chute to the receptacle where the customer can pick up
Speaker 1: and see whatever book it was that they just purchased.
Speaker 1: I love this idea. By the way, there are also
Speaker 1: other really clever vending machines or repurposed vending machines that
Speaker 1: dispense stuff like art and literature, and I love it
Speaker 1: to me. It's one of those brilliant uses of technology.
Speaker 1: It's a bit of a curiosity, but it leads to
Speaker 1: delight and I think that's phenomenal. I'll talk about another
Speaker 1: one before we get to the end of this episode,
Speaker 1: but moving on, so now we're up to eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: and we see another Englishman, this one named Simeon Denham,
Speaker 1: who filed a patent for a device that he created
Speaker 1: that was intended to dispense postage stamps. Denham's idea was
Speaker 1: to locate these machines in places that had a lot
Speaker 1: of foot traffic, like train stations, but were not necessarily
Speaker 1: convenient to a post office, so you could easily buy
Speaker 1: a stamp when you were near one of these machines,
Speaker 1: not that different from the postage stamp machines that we
Speaker 1: see today. In May of eighteen fifty eight, the newspaper
Speaker 1: The Times published an article describing Denham's device, saying, quote,
Speaker 1: the instrument was intended for the delivery of postage or
Speaker 1: other stamps singly to purchasers, so as to dispense, what
Speaker 1: with the attendance of an official for this purpose at
Speaker 1: post offices. A penny being put into a hole near
Speaker 1: the top unlocks the instrument and allows a handle to
Speaker 1: be used in such an extent as to protrude from
Speaker 1: between two rollers a single stamp, which the purchaser tears off.
Speaker 1: One stamp only can be had at a time, and
Speaker 1: a haypenny or smaller coin is rejected pretty clever doesn't
Speaker 1: go into the actual mechanics. Again. That is one of
Speaker 1: the issues with a lot of these stories is that
Speaker 1: you just hear that they were made, or at least
Speaker 1: were designed, but you don't get a whole lot of
Speaker 1: detail about the actual systems that were being used at
Speaker 1: that point. This one, at least we got the rollers,
Speaker 1: which makes sense, Like the rollers put pressure and when
Speaker 1: they move together extend a stamp. By controlling how far
Speaker 1: the rollers can turn, you can make sure that it
Speaker 1: only allows you access to a single stamp for the
Speaker 1: amount of money you put in. Thus, so you can
Speaker 1: control how many units the customer can get. That stuff
Speaker 1: all makes sense, but it's the barest of details, right. Apparently,
Speaker 1: the patent awarded to Denim is number seven hundred and six.
Speaker 1: I tried to track it down so I could get
Speaker 1: a better idea the working mechanism. All I could really
Speaker 1: find were records where the patent would be stored in
Speaker 1: physical form, and I'm not in England, so I can't
Speaker 1: just pop over to the the respective library and dig
Speaker 1: it up. According to several sources, Denim secured a provisional
Speaker 1: patent but never pursued a full patent, so it is
Speaker 1: also it's possible that this version of the vending machine
Speaker 1: never got beyond the hey, you know what would be
Speaker 1: a really good idea phase of invention that is more
Speaker 1: common than I would care for. By the eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: things had gone beyond just good ideas, and engineers in
Speaker 1: places like Germany and England began create creating actual early
Speaker 1: vending machines. One in England created a vending machine designed
Speaker 1: to either dispense envelopes and stamps, or you could choose
Speaker 1: to purchase an already stamped postcard. In America, a guy
Speaker 1: named W. H. Freud if r u E N file
Speaker 1: the patent for a device that, upon insertion of a coin,
Speaker 1: would dispense some mineral water. I did look over that patent,
Speaker 1: I could actually find that one, and I'm left with
Speaker 1: a feeling that it's not that different from Hero of
Speaker 1: Alexandria's old Holy water dispenser. It's a little more complicated,
Speaker 1: actually a lot more complicated. They're more moving parts and stuff,
Speaker 1: but the basic idea is essentially the same that by
Speaker 1: putting coins into the machine, you end up changing the
Speaker 1: device so that or you make changes in the device
Speaker 1: so that a valve opens up and liquid dispenses out,
Speaker 1: in this case mineral water. Also. Freud's version of this
Speaker 1: was to design the dispenser in such a way that
Speaker 1: it looked like a like a brownstone building. It looked
Speaker 1: like a building. It didn't look like, you know, a
Speaker 1: tank or anything like that, although there was obviously a
Speaker 1: tank inside the device I used to hold the mineral water.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was a weird looking thing. I recommend
Speaker 1: checking it out if you get a chance to do
Speaker 1: a search on w H. Freud, fr u E N
Speaker 1: and mineral water vending machine. It's a cool patent. Okay,
Speaker 1: we are now on the precipice of the true age
Speaker 1: of vending machines. We're going to take another quick break.
Speaker 1: When we come back, i'll talk about the explosion of
Speaker 1: creativity that would follow in the late eighteen hundreds and
Speaker 1: into the twentieth century. We're back, and as I said
Speaker 1: just before the break, the real dawning of the vending
Speaker 1: machine age can be traced to eighteen eighty eight and
Speaker 1: the two D fruity machine. Yep, too dy fruity a
Speaker 1: wamp bomp aloo bomp a womp bamboom so tooty fruity
Speaker 1: references chewing gum. That's a fruity flavor of chewing gum
Speaker 1: that was being sold primarily in the northeastern United States.
Speaker 1: And there was this guy named Thomas Adams who invented
Speaker 1: a flavor of chewing gum called two D Fruity. He
Speaker 1: also did a spearmint, blackjack clove flavored chewing gums. But
Speaker 1: he also patented and created a two D Fruity gum machine.
Speaker 1: And it had a coin slot, and it had a
Speaker 1: shelf for the product to land in, and had two levers,
Speaker 1: so when you would put a coin in the slot
Speaker 1: and press the levers down, it activated the mechanism inside
Speaker 1: which would allow a piece of gum to fall down
Speaker 1: a chute and land in the little dispenser shelf for
Speaker 1: someone to pick up. They were not terribly reliable, according
Speaker 1: to to contemporary reports that they were often not working properly.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes someone would shove something into a coin
Speaker 1: slot that gummed it up for everyone, or just got jammed,
Speaker 1: or it was empty, but there was no way of
Speaker 1: telling it was empty until after you had put a
Speaker 1: coin in and pushed believers down, and then there's no
Speaker 1: way to get your coin back, So they definitely had issues,
Speaker 1: but according to at least some reports, they were pretty
Speaker 1: darn popular. He put a lot of vending machines on
Speaker 1: places like along the New York City subway system, along
Speaker 1: the platforms for the subways, and so people would get
Speaker 1: to the subway, they'd be waiting on a train, and
Speaker 1: meanwhile there'd be this little machine where they could get
Speaker 1: a nice tasty piece of two D fruity gum for
Speaker 1: just a penny, and it wasn't socially inacceptable to chew gum,
Speaker 1: so you could actually do that and help pass some time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it turned out that would be a real foot hold
Speaker 1: for vending machines, and yeah, it got to a point
Speaker 1: where it inspired a lot of other shop owners to
Speaker 1: do something similar. A lot of the early innovation were
Speaker 1: in things like how to make sure that you had
Speaker 1: the right coins being used, because once you get past
Speaker 1: the penny slot type stuff, you know, if you're talking
Speaker 1: about things that cost more than a penny, like it's
Speaker 1: maybe ten cents or five cents, then figuring out ways
Speaker 1: to accept different kinds of coins would become part of
Speaker 1: the challenge. And there were lots of interesting mechanical systems here,
Speaker 1: because remember this is before we get into electronics, and
Speaker 1: those mechanical systems would include things like you know, like
Speaker 1: a ratchet gear which can turn in one direction, but
Speaker 1: because of a poll, cannot turn the other way. This
Speaker 1: is that clicking noise you hear when you use like
Speaker 1: an old school gum machine, like a gumball machine, you
Speaker 1: put a coin in, you start turning. You hear that
Speaker 1: click click, click, click click noise. That's the poll clicking
Speaker 1: against the ratchet. It is the ratchet is angled in
Speaker 1: such a way where you can turn the handle one way,
Speaker 1: like clockwise from your perspective, but you can't turn it
Speaker 1: the opposite direction. It prevents it from going back the
Speaker 1: other way. Or building a machine that relies on gravity.
Speaker 1: Gumball machines are another good example. Like don't make it
Speaker 1: more complicated that it needs to be. Use the physical
Speaker 1: laws to your advantage, where nature herself is replenishing the
Speaker 1: supply for the next piece available. So like in a
Speaker 1: candy bar machine, that'd be a stack of candy bars
Speaker 1: in it, and activating the device would allow what candy
Speaker 1: bar to slide through, but it also would mean that
Speaker 1: gravity would pull everything else down, So that the next
Speaker 1: candy bar is in position for whomever uses the machine next.
Speaker 1: Really really clever stuff to like minimize the amount of
Speaker 1: mechanics that you need for making one of these machines
Speaker 1: work at a basic level. Obviously, later you go, the
Speaker 1: more complicated these machines would get. It would not take
Speaker 1: very much time at all for people to try and
Speaker 1: figure out ways to cheat vending machines to use like
Speaker 1: a slug, for example, which is just something that's about
Speaker 1: the same size and weight as a coin, but it's
Speaker 1: not a coin, like a hollowed out disk of steel,
Speaker 1: for example, it's often a disc because you could tie
Speaker 1: a string through the whole of the disk and then
Speaker 1: potentially retrieve your slug for use again to just cheat
Speaker 1: a machine out of all of its supply. So a
Speaker 1: lot of innovation was then dedicated to ways to try
Speaker 1: and prevent people from cheating. So one thing that started
Speaker 1: going into machines were really powerful magnets, which wouldn't really
Speaker 1: affect regular coins because there's not enough ferromagnetic material in
Speaker 1: them for it to make a big difference. But if
Speaker 1: you're using like steel slugs, they would be pulled the
Speaker 1: magnet and get caught there, so you wouldn't activate the machine.
Speaker 1: I Meanwhile, like when the vendor would come and open
Speaker 1: things up, they could clear all the slugs out, So
Speaker 1: that would be one way. But there were also ways
Speaker 1: where they would develop systems that would essentially detect the
Speaker 1: size and weight of coins to allow the right coins
Speaker 1: to go through and to deny the wrong coins from
Speaker 1: going through. So, for example, when you get into the
Speaker 1: nickel and dime era, a lot of those machines would
Speaker 1: not accept pennies. They would accept nickels and dimes, and
Speaker 1: that's it, And so the slot would be big enough
Speaker 1: for a nickel to fit through, but not for something
Speaker 1: like a quarter or a half dollar or something like
Speaker 1: that to go through. Pennies, however, are slightly larger than dimes,
Speaker 1: but they're smaller than nickels. So how do you account
Speaker 1: for those? How do you get it so that a
Speaker 1: machine can tell the difference between a penny and a dime. Well,
Speaker 1: one thing you can do is build essentially a track
Speaker 1: that the coins go down, where the track has holes
Speaker 1: in it, and those holes are large enough for a
Speaker 1: dime to fit through, but not for a penny or
Speaker 1: a nickel. And then a little further down the track,
Speaker 1: you have holes that a penny can fit through but
Speaker 1: not a nickel, and you have the dimes divert to
Speaker 1: a path that activates the machine. You have the nickels
Speaker 1: divert to a path that will activate the machine. Pennies
Speaker 1: will end up going down a chute that's to the
Speaker 1: return coin slot, so you don't end up counting the
Speaker 1: pennies as dimes. Pretty clever, simple approach, but limited as
Speaker 1: time would go on. You would have other methods to
Speaker 1: do this sort of thing, where you would have optical
Speaker 1: sensors and electromagnets inside a machine to detect coins and
Speaker 1: make sure they are the correct coins to go through.
Speaker 1: So you know, optical sensors could measure the size of
Speaker 1: a coin as it rolls past, now, measuring the diameter
Speaker 1: of the coin and determining, all right, well that's a quarter,
Speaker 1: you know, because these would be very precise these days,
Speaker 1: our coins are uniform in shape and weight and consistent.
Speaker 1: And see, the electromagnet would determine exactly what kind of
Speaker 1: metals were used to make that coin, So again you
Speaker 1: could prevent fakes from going through, even if those fakes
Speaker 1: were the same size and weight of legitimate coins, right,
Speaker 1: because if unless they're made of the exact same stuff,
Speaker 1: in which case they might as well be a coin,
Speaker 1: then you're you're not going to fool the machine. Later on,
Speaker 1: you would have, you know, pending machines that clearly could
Speaker 1: accept paper currency. These typically have a simple optical system
Speaker 1: in them where they can detect the note has been
Speaker 1: put in, using various stuff like ultraviolet light and other
Speaker 1: mythod methods for looking for the telltale signs of is
Speaker 1: this an acceptable form of currency or not. It's not
Speaker 1: like it's you know, detecting forgeries or whatever. It's just saying, okay,
Speaker 1: well does this match what I am allowed to accept
Speaker 1: as payment or if it doesn't, I reject it and
Speaker 1: the little dollar comes rolling right back out. So if
Speaker 1: your dollars really dirty or are hard to read because
Speaker 1: it's been crumpled up so much, it may not be
Speaker 1: accepted by a vending machine because the sensors cannot verify
Speaker 1: that it's a real dollar bill. And then even later
Speaker 1: still you have vending machines that work with things like
Speaker 1: credit and debit cards, And we started to get into
Speaker 1: the realm of the crazy super modern machines. But those
Speaker 1: early ones, to me, are really fascinating because again, they
Speaker 1: were largely mechanical systems. Even when you get into the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties where they started to get electrified, and then
Speaker 1: you get into the nineteen fifties and sixties where they
Speaker 1: started getting a little more sophisticated, a lot of the
Speaker 1: actual operations of the machines were mechanical systems, and to me,
Speaker 1: that's really just cool because so much of what we
Speaker 1: work with and interact with today are digital systems that
Speaker 1: we can kind of forget the engine new that went
Speaker 1: into creating these mechanical devices that could dole out stuff
Speaker 1: for whatever money we put in, and that stuff is
Speaker 1: all sorts of things, right. They've made vending machines for
Speaker 1: crazy stuff. I mean, like even early on, like in
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds, Paris had vending machines that were connected
Speaker 1: to the city's water system and you could go and
Speaker 1: purchase quarts of water. Hot water in Paris vending machines
Speaker 1: that were connected to the system. So maybe you don't
Speaker 1: have a water furnace at home, you could buy hot
Speaker 1: water and then carry it home for use, which was
Speaker 1: kind of interesting. Or in England, in Birmingham, England. They
Speaker 1: had the gas company came up with a clever way
Speaker 1: of making people pay to you know, stay warm and
Speaker 1: not die in the winter. They had systems set up
Speaker 1: with gas pipes where you would put in a coin
Speaker 1: for a certain amount of cubic volume of natural gas
Speaker 1: for the purposes of heating, and that would just essentially
Speaker 1: allot that amount to you until the amount ran out,
Speaker 1: and then you'd have to put more money in if
Speaker 1: you wanted to maintain heat. But there were tons of
Speaker 1: different vnting machines and still are in some places. Japan
Speaker 1: is famous for its vending machines and for its variety
Speaker 1: of vending machines. There were vending machines that dispensed alcohol, which,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, could easily be abused. Cigarettes very
Speaker 1: common until the nineteen nineties here in the United States,
Speaker 1: still common in some places but not here in the US.
Speaker 1: In fact, I saw a great video of an artist
Speaker 1: in the Carolinas who has taken cigarette machines and turned
Speaker 1: them into art dispensing machines. So you come up to
Speaker 1: one and you look at the different art that is available.
Speaker 1: You put in five dollars, you pull a lever and
Speaker 1: it dispenses the art and it's called the Arto Mattic
Speaker 1: and they apparently have been populating various places, including as
Speaker 1: far away as Australia. I have never seen one of these,
Speaker 1: but I think it's a cool idea. It's very similar
Speaker 1: to the bibliomatic that I mentioned earlier in the episode.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you'd find them for stuff like perfume or
Speaker 1: for soap or soup, and that one letter makes a
Speaker 1: big difference. I saw one that was hot curry over rice,
Speaker 1: and that was interesting too because that machine that I
Speaker 1: saw on a video, it was a Japanese machine that
Speaker 1: served hot curry on rice. The machine did not have
Speaker 1: a microwave in it some of the machines that serve
Speaker 1: hot food. The way that works is the machine is
Speaker 1: designed to microwave your selection and then give you a
Speaker 1: hot meal. This one had heating elements inside the machine
Speaker 1: because it was it predated microwaves, so using electricity it
Speaker 1: kept everything hot and you would have to have someone
Speaker 1: cook rice, portion it out in bowls, put the bowls
Speaker 1: inside the machine. At the beginning of the day. It
Speaker 1: held pouches of curry and when you put the money
Speaker 1: in the machine would hold the pouch in place, a
Speaker 1: knife would slice the pouch open, and it would squeeze
Speaker 1: the pouch on top of a bowl of this cooked
Speaker 1: rice and then serve you curry over rice, which I
Speaker 1: just thought was really clever. But there's been tons of
Speaker 1: other stuff, Like I saw in one video that supposedly
Speaker 1: there were vending machines out in the Western United States
Speaker 1: that sold divorce papers. That's pretty enterprising. Or you know
Speaker 1: a car, you would buy the keys to a car
Speaker 1: through a vending machine, which is again crazy, but yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no shortage of those. And like, there's so many
Speaker 1: different kinds with different delivery systems. To talk about how
Speaker 1: they all work would get pretty long winded and repetitive
Speaker 1: in many ways. The one thing I will say is
Speaker 1: that there are classic snack machine here in the United States,
Speaker 1: the ones that have the spirals. The way those work
Speaker 1: is when you make your selection, then a motor that's
Speaker 1: behind all the selections behind those bars engages with the
Speaker 1: mechanism that connects to that curved bar that holds the
Speaker 1: snacks in place, and then it rotates it three hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty degrees. So there's essentially an axle that plugs
Speaker 1: in to some gears that then are connected to the spiral.
Speaker 1: It rotates the spiral three hundred and sixty degrees, which
Speaker 1: is supposed to dispense a treat now, whatever the snack is.
Speaker 1: Typically there's some sort of optical system towards the bottom
Speaker 1: of these vending machines that can detect whether or not
Speaker 1: something went through, and if nothing went through, some of
Speaker 1: these machines will then do a second rotation of that
Speaker 1: wire just in case something had been like accidentally mis installed,
Speaker 1: or maybe two things came out the last rotation, and
Speaker 1: so there's a gap and then hopefully your potato chips
Speaker 1: or popcorn or whatever it might be falls through and
Speaker 1: you can pick it up. But yeah, there's so many
Speaker 1: different mechanisms and so many different varieties. I went through
Speaker 1: a long rabbit hole of watching videos of vending machines,
Speaker 1: which ended up not being very useful for this episode,
Speaker 1: but it was really entertaining. So if you ever want
Speaker 1: to just waste a few hours watching you know, ridiculous
Speaker 1: vending machine footage, there's no shortage of it online, I'm
Speaker 1: happy to tell you. And that's it. That's it for
Speaker 1: this little look at the history of vending machines. Like
Speaker 1: I said, like the real history of the modern day
Speaker 1: vending machine can be traced back to the late eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds early nineteen hundreds. I would say that the heyday
Speaker 1: was probably the fifties and sixties. It's when we saw
Speaker 1: like the rise of the automat. That would have been
Speaker 1: the restaurants that you could go to where you could
Speaker 1: get things like a sandwich or a piece of pie
Speaker 1: or whatever by putting some money into a slot and
Speaker 1: then opening up a drawer and pulling out your selection
Speaker 1: and sitting down and never interacting with another human being.
Speaker 1: I know a lot of people personally who would love
Speaker 1: it if everything they ever had to get was an
Speaker 1: a vending machine so they never had to interact with
Speaker 1: other human beings. I am not that person, but I
Speaker 1: understand where they're coming from. Yeah, anyways, super cool stuff.
Speaker 1: You can totally check out more videos on YouTube, and
Speaker 1: I sure hope you do, because, like I said, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of really entertaining ones. That's it. I
Speaker 1: hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts
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