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Your Wish is Granted
Coin-operated fortune
telling machines were popular at amusement parks and penny arcades in
the 1930s and after. Those
were years that dropping coins into game slots seemed like the last
thing people would be doing with their money.
But actually, if a person had a spare penny or two, the arcades
were a cheap, temporary way to put their real-world problems on the
backburner. The
fortune machines were simple: the Mystic Pen, for
instance, wrote out a “special” fortune for a player after he
inserted a penny. And
Exhibit Supply’s An Answer from Beyond had players ask
pertinent questions and then glean answers from a picture of the
all-knowing Egyptian mummy Ramasees, located just inside the cabinet. A
few years later, arcades saw the coming of more elaborate fortune
telling booths, and in terms of coin-op artistry, these might just have
taken the cake. Inside the
beautifully finished wood cabinets, set behind glass and usually seen
from the chest up, there were mannequin tellers that weren’t just
life-sized, they were also incredibly life-like.
If you were going to pay cold hard cash for something as shady as
a randomly distributed fortune, at least someone who looked the part was
doing the distributing.
Many
of the games built around this time were assembled with parts taken from
pre-war arcade games, because in the war years, new parts for
non-essential mechanical items couldn’t be obtained. In post-war
years, the 50’s and 60’s especially, old-fashioned arcade games came
back into vogue and were widely manufactured. There were still
mannequins, but they tended not to be as finely detailed as they were in
previous years. Sometimes
just the idea of a fortune teller was compelling enough. A shiny metal
“Swami” napkin holder, for instance, was eerily used in the “Nick
of Time” Twilight Zone episode, dispensing a whole lot more than
just napkins to its diner patron, played by a young William Shatner.
The
Zoltan booths came out in these same years. Again, the bearded
wise man inside the glass may not have had that 1930’s-type mannequin
authenticity, but he did offer a telephone handset which the player
picked up to hear his fortune. This little innovation merged the two
disparate worlds of telecommunication and fortune telling, and—one
never knows—may have paved the way for the future of paid fortune
tellers, psychic hotlines. There
also is a fortune-telling machine named “Zoltan” that often
is confused with Zoltar. The
name "Zoltan" may have come from the Hungarian word for
Sultan and the figure was dressed like a sultan.
The first fortune-telling machines probably were made in the
1890s, and the first electric coin-operated machines in about 1910.
Experts say that Zoltan was introduced in 1965 and that
only 50 or 60 were made. After
the movie Big came out, some reproductions were made of
fiberglass. A dime went in
the slot. Later models
required a quarter.
The
most valued fortune telling machine today is the Gypsy.
She actually talks to you from two Edison cylinder machines
that're inside the mechanism. There are two coin slots, one for male and
one for female. Depending on where you put the coin, that's which Edison
cylinder machine, will be turned on at that point.
When you drop a nickel in the slot, her eyes would flash, her
teeth would chatter and her voice would come floating from a tube
extending out of the eight-foot-tall box.
But
Montana Heritage commission curators representing the Gypsy's
owner, the state of Montana, rejected the idea, saying cashing in on
this piece of history would be akin to selling their soul. The
state inherited the Gypsy in 1998 when it paid $6.5 million to
buy nearly 250 buildings and their contents in Virginia City and nearby
Nevada City from the son of Charles Bovey.
The Montana collector spent years buying up the buildings to
preserve the two crumbling ghost towns and he stocked them with his
ever-growing collection of antique games, music machines and oddities. The
Gypsy was made sometime around 1906 by the Mills Novelty Co. In
restoring her, the curators either replaced or repaired frayed, worn or
broken parts with exact replicas. When they couldn't find replicas or
period materials, they didn't replace the parts.
Some
of the other more known and collectible fortune tellers are listed
below. Madame
Zita
is a richly attired fortune teller in gypsy style. The Roover Brothers
manufactured the electric version around 1905.
There are only a handful of surviving original specimens.
It's among the most desirable electric tellers from the golden
age of automated machines. At
the turn of a handle the teller, a gypsy styled figure, reaches for a
card and drops it into the chute for the customer.
William
Gent who lived in the Cleveland, Ohio area during the 1930s, made
Grandmothers Predictions. The wise old grandmother passes her hands
over the fortune telling cards and stops at the proper fortune. The card
falls into the tray below. International
Mutoscope later copied the wise Grandma fortune teller for a version
they produced which was mechanically identical but the cabinet was
different. Grandmother's
head moved left and right and nodded up and down, her hand moved over
the cards, her chest moving like she is breathing, and she of course
gave out a fortune card. Geneco
Mfg., New York, made Geneco Gypsy Grandma Fortune Teller in the
1940s & 1950s. The
central attraction of the original boardwalk and arcades was the Gypsy
Grandma that came to life after a coin was deposited into a slot.
Once a selection was made using a rotary dial that illuminated
the player's astrological sign of Estrella's
Prophecies Fortune
Teller is a Coin-Op Gypsy-style Fortune Teller Machine.
She is a full size enclosed figure in an elaborate oak cabinet.
Her head moves from side to side, hand moves across the cards,
while her left hand raises and then she slowly dispenses a fortune card
through the ornate card slot. Most of these
coin-operated fortune-telling machines sell for high prices.
Think
of it. A wish for a
coin…it has to be the greatest bargain of all time. |
Collectors
realized the machine was one of two or three "verbal" fortune
tellers left in the world.
