Coin Slot Magazine - #029 - 1977 - June [International Arcade Museum]
The true treasure comes last, far right front. This is the only known
photograph of an identifiable C.H. Miles machine, and it's the firm's
best seller: CUPID. There is no mistaking the identification; it's
crafted in the glass:
"C.H. MILES/CUPID".
The photograph
literally saves this great model from oblivion, for there may be
no C.H. Miles machines remaining anywhere unless some collector
isn't telling. Charles H. Miles was only in the machine manufacturing
business for a number of months at the end of 1903 in Chicago at
12 S. Canal Street, old address.
When the Watlings bought out
Schall, Miles took him in after a while.
The firm was called
Schall & Miles, and they started right out making all the machines
that Schall had produced before the Watling buyout. By the end
of 1903 the firm was just plain C.H. Miles, and advertised "The
best money and trade machines in the world".
Perhaps the
machines weren't quite that good, because by the spring of 1904
Miles was out of business and the same machines were being
made by The White Manufacturing Company at 72 S. Canal,
right around
the corner.
How many C.H. Miles machines were made, and where are they?
The picture may show three of them. If the operator bought one
from Miles, he probably bought more. The real clue is in the coin
heads. Both CUPID and STAR have the same coin head, handles
and feet. Miles made both machines, as well as CROWN PRINCE
as well as over two dozen others according to the literature.
In
fact, the 1903 C.H. Miles catalogue was forty-eight pages long,
and may have been the very thing that busted him.
Back to the coin head. Seeing it on a C.H. Miles machine suggests
that it was brought to Schall & Miles by Daniel Schall, and was
probably well known by 1903.
It certainly didn't get to Miles
through the Watlings. Therefore, it's a Schall head, picked up by
Watling and others when Schall was at loose ends. This could well
explain the confusion of seeing this particular head on so many
dissimilar machines, something rarely seen with the Mills or Caille
heads.
At least one surviving C.H. Miles machine was known to exist some
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years ago.
Alden Scott Boyer, the cosmetic tycoon and the first
real slot machine collector, had a Miles FOX in his "Chicago Coin
Device Museum" in 1939.
Boyer claimed he got it from an
operator named Morrison from a small town in Illinois called
Flanagan, east of Peoria, once a wide-open city.
According to
Boyer, the machine "contained a ringing bell to attract players".
After Boyer's death, and at the time of the auction of his collection
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