Zoë Blade's notebook

Flipper

A flipper is a small pivoted bat used to hit a ball to the back of the playfield in a pinball machine. By pressing a button on each side of the machine, you can independently swing the left and right flippers.

Before they had flippers, pinball machines had relied on simply pulling the plunger with just the right amount of force. By later standards, this made for pretty short and uneventful games.

Some of the companies making pinball machines also made baseball-themed pitch and bat games. These let you press one button to release a pinball from the middle of the playfield, and then press another button to swing a miniature bat at the ball (just once, as with the real baseball). The aim was to hit one of the targets lining the top of the playfield with the ball.

After working on a pitch and bat game, Gottlieb engineer Harry Mabs imported and refined the miniature bat — three pairs of them, no less — into the next pinball game he worked on, Humpty Dumpty, letting the player swing them as often as they liked.[1][2][3][4] This device was proudly branded with text declaring its new name: a flipper.

Other engineers refined the flipper. Steven Kordek made them strong enough to send the ball all the way from the very front to the very back of the playfield, paring the number of flippers back to a single pair.[4] Others soon swapped them around, so they faced inwards, and positioned them at the front-centre of the playfield, flanking the drain. By the 1950s, this configuration had become an integral part of almost every pinball machine, and by far the most important influence the player had on the game, the main point of interaction used to keep the ball in play. Flippers' ubiquity remained unchanged for the rest of pinball's history.

If you ever needed proof that pinball machines were an American invention, just remember that their flippers are essentially a pair of miniature baseball bats.

On a side note, the lesser-known Olympic Pins had something similar to the flipper back in 1935,[3] but it was Humpty Dumpty that became so popular it forced everyone to copy it.

References

  1. Pinball Portfolio Harry McKeown, 1976, pp. 27—64
  2. Pinball! Roger Sharpe, 1977, ISBN 0-525-47481-1, pp. 54—55
  3. Tilt: The Pinball Book Candace Tolbert, Jim Tolbert, 1978, ISBN 0-916870-14-6, pp. 79—98
  4. Pinball: The Lure of the Silver Ball Gary Flower & Bill Kurtz, 1988, ISBN 1-55521-322-7, pp. 36—49

Pinball machines: Flipper | Humpty Dumpty