The Archaeology of the Fruit Machine
livery stable for his horse and buggy. Then he
quickly returned to his doomed shop to salvage
what he could. Fortunately he did save his most
prized possession, the original Liberty Bell
machine and a few lesser valuables.
"After the fire Fey returned to find that the
handsome edifice that housed his shop was in a
complete state of ruin. The interior of the building
had been completely gutted by fire. All that he was
able to salvage was a mass of molten nickels found
in the cash can of a slot buried in a pile of rubble
on the ground floor. He mounted the souvenir of
melted nickels on a casting that he was to treasure
the rest of his life as a memento of the 1906
holocaust,,.
Severe blow
Doubtless the destruction of his workshop must
have been a severe blow, forcing him to spend
what capital and energy he had left upon building
and equipping a new workshop in Jesse Street,
rather than on expanding the company's
production or marketing capacity. However it is
debatable as tc whether, had the earthquake not
happened, he would have had the ability or the
foresight to undertake the marketing of the
machine on a national scale, for, it must be
remembered, it was never operated beyond the
San Fransisco area.
Its manufacture was never subcontracted, neither
was a partnership formed in order to provide
capital to exploit the machines' potential. The
machine itself was manufactured for only one or
two years, and a recent estimate of the number of
Liberty Bell machines ever produced concluded a
total output of some 50 or 60 machines-hardly
enough to shake the world.
As important a symbol as Fey has become to the
history of automatic machines, both in terms of
his innovative skill, and his longevity within the
manufacturing field, his greatest achievement
appears in retrospect to have been the persistent
nature of the divergent and often misleading
stories which have clung to his name.
At this point in the story there exists two
contradictory versions of events. One little known
version emanates from the Mills family. It states
that because of his financial difficulties following
the 1906 earthquake, Fey took his machine to the
Mills Novelty Company in Chicago, and offered
them the manufacturing rights to the Liberty Bell
in exchange for the first 50 such machines that the
company produced. The offer was accepted and
the Mills company set to work in producing a
more sophisticated version of the Fey machine.
However, no contemporary written evidence has
been found so far to support this story.
Reservations for its ready acceptance rest on two
factors. Firstly, Fey received no credit for his
machine in the subsequent Mills advertising
literature unlike, for example, M. A. Larkin, who
in 1908 had struck a deal with the company
relating to the production of a dice machine of his
own design, the On The Level, whereby he was
used not only for testimonials, but was also given
the Californian distributorship. Secondly, since
Fey's machine was unpatented, Mills would, in
fact, have had no need to get permission from Fey
in order to manufacture a copy of it.
The second, though somewhat mellowed version,
emanates from the Fey family. Its gist, as is to be
expected, is favourable to Fey, yet its real
occurence is to my mind of equal probability to
the Mills version. It runs as follows: Even though
Fey was scarcely able to cope with the demand for
the machine he refused all offers for the
manufacturing and distribution rights. As a
consequence the machine was never used beyond
the State of California. He feared that the
machine would be copied, a common enough
practice at the time, but he could not patent it
because it was not for 'the public good' (although
in practice there were ways around this as
exemplified by the 1911 Mills patent for the
Liberty Bell as a gum vending device).
Fey neither sold nor leased his machines, but
instead chose only to operate them locally on a
percentage basis. This, he believed, would stop
competitors from acquiring a machine and therby
copying it. It was a futile attempt, as Fey must
have realised when, according to the story, he
discovered that one of his machines had
disappeared from a local saloon.
During this period all of the three increasingly
important manufacturing companies of Mills,
Caille and Watling maintained branch offices in
San Fransisco. The parent companies must have
soon been made aware of the success that Fey's
Liberty Bell was having. It must have been to his
great dismay, therefore, to hear that the Mills
Novelty Company of Chicago, in January 1909,
were announcing the manufacture of a brand new
machine, known as the Mills Liberty Bell!