What was the first true pinball table?

[JoshuaKadmon]

We all know that pinball traces its ancestry back to 19th Century bagatelle tables, but what do you consider to be the first true "pinball" table? Popular answers would be Whiffle Board in 1931, Ballyhoo in 1934, Humpty Dumpty in 1947, or Triple Action in 1950. But what actually constitutes a pinball table by our current definition? Is it enough just to have a launcher and flippers, or do the flippers need to be placed at the bottom above the drain? Is a table without a backglass a pinball table at all, or just an ancestral gaming device?

 

[Carl Spiby]

In my opinion, the first table with flippers in the natural position which according to Wikipedia was Spot Bowler.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

I wondered when the actual word "pinball" came into use to describe such a game. Dictionary.com says 1880-85; the Online Etymology Dictionary claims the earliest cite is 1911 (and that earlier, the word referred to a pincushion).

It seems strange to deny the appellation to the games that literally had a lot of pins on the playfield, even though they were obviously very different from a modern pinball.

 

[Bonzo]

The German word for a (modern) pinball table is "Flipper", so that makes it easy for me to think the first true table would be one with (at least) two flippers facing inward left and right of the center drain.

 

[J2fold]

Oh man, I am picking one of these up from my parents house. I am not sure where they got it but It must be pretty close to one of the first ones that had lights and bumpers. It shows some women in 1940's style bathing suits and it never had flippers you just shoot the ball and watch it drop in some holes that pop the ball out and bounce off some rubber bumpers, not only that this thing must weigh a ton. I guess the object is to make the lady dive off the diving board on the back glass. Each time you make it in a hole the lady lights up as she drops until she hits the water.

 

[JoshuaKadmon]

You sure you aren't thinking of High Diver from 1959? Yeah, it's old, but it definitely had flippers. Not too many tables had backglasses before the mid-40's, but maybe High Diver isn't the one, after all...

 

[Matt McIrvin]

Anyway, I think I'm comfortable dating pinball from the beginning of the pinball industry, with those early 1930s coin-op games; what came before was proto-pinball, even if a few of them had nearly all the features of Whiffle Board or Baffle Ball. They hadn't caught on yet.

But pinball-as-we-know-it-today is the flipper game with inward-facing flippers just above the drain, which seems to have happened around 1950.

 

[BonzoGonzo]

The German word for a (modern) pinball table is "Flipper", so that makes it easy for me to think the first true table would be one with (at least) two flippers facing inward left and right of the center drain.

funny you should say that, becouse us folks in Slovenia also call it 'flipper' and not pinball

but then again we use lots of deutsche worts in spoken language (as opposed to the officiall dictionary one)... like luft for air or up, gank for balcony, fris (from fressen i guess) for face, speise for pantry and so on and so forth