Mechanical Memories Magazine

The History of the Wall Machine
Part Three -Allwins
Having looked at Dropcase games and Catchers, it's now time to move on to what
was to become the most popular British amusement machine of all time. Of the
three great European slot machine manufacturers, Britain played no part in the
allwin's early evolution. But by the 1930s we had adopted it as our own, and
continued the development of a machine that would become intrinsically British,
and rule supreme in our amusement arcades for half a century.
So who invented the wheel? The truth is, the wheel was not 'invented'; rather the idea
evolved at different times, in different places in the world, over a long period of time.
Much the same can be said of the allwin, although it's early evolution was confined to
France and Germany. The fact that the allwin was never patented, and even the name
'all win' was never subject to copyright, must surely rank as one of the greatest missed
opportunities in the entire congress of coin-op!
In the absence of a patent, it is perhaps difficult to define the allwin. Essentially, it
is a machine in which a ball is propelled around a spiral track, with the aim of having the
ball land in one of a number of winning cups, thus effecting some form of payout. The
winning cups may be in the form of a 'gallery' (traditionally a line of seven cups or
tubes, the two outermost being 'lose' and the five between them 'win') or individual
cups of up to twenty-four in number, placed around the playfield. Some may view this
as a very loose definition, indeed Jon Gresham, in his 'Concise History and Museum
Guide' (incorrectly in my view) gives this explanation: 'The allwin is a specific machine
in which a ball is hopefully caught in one of a straight line of cups .... .' Jon was referring
to what we term 'Saxony allwins' or those of the galleried format. He held the view that
all other types known generically as allwins should be referred to as 'wall machines'. I
take the view that, in the absence of patent or copyright, any machine which involves a
ball being propelled around a spiral track should quite correctly be termed an allwin.
It's not entirely clear where the allwin's evolutionary path began, or indeed, how it
progressed for a good number of years. In his book 'Automatic Pleasures: The History
of the Coin Machine', Nie Costa cites the Heureka, produced in Leipzig in 1900, as
probably the first wall machine to incorporate the spiral track principle. However, the
term 'allwin' was a long time to come, and it seems that the early development of the
spiral track game was concentrated in France, rather than Germany. Many of the early
French machines were extremely complex, both mechanically and in aesthetic
embellishment, compared to the relatively simple allwins which were to be mass
produced in the Saxony workshops of Germany during the years immediately after the
first World War. Although the early French machines are not generally thought of as
allwins, it is certainly these from which the allwin evolved.
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