Coin Slot Magazine - #045 - 1978 - October [International Arcade Museum]
far ahead, even gaining ground as the years went by.
It was also a widely reported fact in the slot machine business
that Mills made more Bell machines than all other Mills chance
machines combined by a wide margin, and with that we have some
numerical relationships.
By the late 1960s the Mills "MLB" (for
"Mills Liberty Bell") serial numbers ~ issued in straight line num
erical order from the day Mills started making three-reelers in
1909 - had gone over 600,000. If we take that figure and double
it to cover the production of all other slot machine manufacturers
over the years and add half of it to the total to cover the other
slots made by Mills since 1897, we get a total of Yh million slot
machines of all kinds. And that's on the high side. More than
likely including the figures for the modern Bally machines of the
sixties to today, the actual total still falls below YA million. Thaf s
the total slot machine universe, and what we collect is what's left
of a not-so-big number. Even if you double that total to include
all the trade machines ever made - and that's really high for trade
stimulators and counter games - we're still talking less than three
million.
For comparison, about three million cars are junked each
year.
The Mills serial numbers can tell us a lot more and provide a
historical track that explains machine development and the ebbs
and flows of popularity. It is amazing to realize that by 1914 --
only five years after the popularization of the Bell machine -- that
the Mills serials were over 30,000.
More surprising is that by the
next five years of production (subtracting 1917 and 1918 when
World War I halted slot making) they had gone over 100,000;
then doubled in the next decade; and more than re-doubled by
the following decade. Two bellwether Bell machine production
marks announced by Mills over the years included a 90,000 figure
in March, 1924, BILLBOARD ad and a 425,000 figure in SPIN
NING REELS in March, 1938. When World War II halted slot pro
duction again Mills was just under the 500,000 mark, passing the
mark with ease barely one year after WWII had ended.
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duction starts and stops and re-starts.
We should be careful, how
ever, not to make solid judgements based on the few serial num-
theycanbe misleading. As the old
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10
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