Pinball History

4 Things You Didn't Know About Pinball:

1. Pinball Was Illegal
Pinball was banned from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s in most of America's big cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, where the game was born and where virtually all of its manufacturers have historically been located. The stated reason for the bans: Pinball was a game of chance, not skill, and so it was a form of gambling. Many lawmakers also believed pinball to be a mafia-run racket and a time- and dime-waster for impressionable youth. (The machines robbed the "pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money," New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia wrote in a Supreme Court affidavit.)

2. NYPD Held Prohibition-Style Raids on Pinball In New York
The pinball ban was executed in a particularly dramatic fashion. Just weeks after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia issued an ultimatum to the city's police force stating that their top priority would be to round up pinball machines and arrest their owners. La Guardia proceeded to spearhead massive Prohibition-style raids in which thousands of machines were rounded up in a matter of days, before being dramatically smashed with sledgehammers by the mayor and police commissioner. The machines were then dumped into the city's rivers.

3. Pinball Best-Seller
The best-selling pinball machine of all time is still "The Addams Family," which came out in 1991.

4. Pinball Is Still Illegal in Some Places
Just a few years ago, Nashville, Tenn. overturned its ban on children under 18 playing, or even standing within 10 feet of, a pinball machine. And, to this day, it is illegal to play pinball on Sundays in Ocean City, N.J.

Check out the website below for other amazing pinball facts:
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