Coin Slot

Coin Slot Magazine - #044 - 1978 - September [International Arcade Museum]
one had the hand of Tom Watling or his son John Watling on its
cabinet top at one time or another as an implied symbolic blessing
or knighting.
These strong personalities are inseparable from the
surviving machines; somehow they go hand in hand in time.
In
short, Watling machines are distinctive and as collectors we like
things that are different.
It wasn't always that way, and the course of the Watling Bell
machine (The "Bell" is the three-reeler, with the machine class
name deriving from Charlie Fey's original LIBERTY BELL of
1905.) development is both ordinary and, perhaps to some, sur
prising.
As with all slot machine manufacturers, the serial num
bers tell the story.
To get in the Bell business Watling started out around 1911
by copying the Mills "Iron Case" OPERATORS BELL, claw feet
and all.
It's hard to say if they started out with Watling "WLB"
serials (a theoretical serial prefix meaning "Watling Liberty Bell"
that they just might have used) on their own as No. 1, or No. 100,
or No. 1001, or just jumped into the high numbers to look pro
ductive.
Only one or two of the early cast iron Watling OPERA
TORS BELL machines have survived and to date their serial num
bers are unknown.
By 1920 Watling was advertising the fact that
over forty thousand machines "of this type" had been sold-a
true statement if you count Mills Bell sales of the period which
had already gone well over fifty thousand-yet by that time
Watling Bell serials had not reached 20,000.
This alone suggests
that Watling started their own serial sequence to be issued in num
erical order as the other manufacturers did, although the absence
of early known serials makes this hard to confirm.
A lot of collector help is needed to fill out the Watling Bell
om
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:
u
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e
s critical area can be identified
accompanying this article,
m if u any
d fro d yet
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e
d
it is the period
ca 1911 and 1926. We just don't have much
nloa between
ar first
.
w
o
w
information
about
the
thirty thousand Watling numbers, and
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we don't even
know
if
they
actually
made that many Bell machines.
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machine serial numbers as you can see from the scant starter list
Any numbers from this period can be very helpful, so if you know
them, send them in.
© The International Arcade Museum
http://www.arcade-museum.com/