Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

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bob
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by bob »

Having had time to read the text of the patent properly it does seem that Gameswat is right and The Convicts is a working model and not Matthewson's lost machine. I'm afraid I was sucked in by the similarity to the appearance of the front of the working model and the drawing by Mathewson's step grandson. Still don't know where I got the photo from, I'm afraid.
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Re: One Strange Duck

Post by daleman »

Topic split, moved, edited & merged from Re: One Strange Duck (Firman & Co. Products) - Site Admin.

...The same is true of Mathewson's Mermaid/ Lighthouses. He did not design the cases - they were originally made for the aquarium at Crystal Palace where Mathewson had a concession. He obviously did a deal with the foundry who originally cast them and reworked them so that they could be used as arcade games. Source of this information was Fred Bolland who actually knew Mathewson.
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gameswat
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Re: One Strange Duck

Post by gameswat »

daleman wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 7:12 pm The same is true of Mathewson's Mermaid/ Lighthouses. He did not design the cases - they were originally made for the aquarium at Crystal Palace where Mathewson had a concession. He obviously did a deal with the foundry who originally cast them and reworked them so that they could be used as arcade games. Source of this information was Fred Bolland who actually knew Mathewson.
As for this attribution, all I can say is what a load of old Bollocks! This is a quote from an earlier Bob Klepner post on the Automatic Sports thread : "Little is also known about where Rowland fits into the picture. Some of this was cleared up by Bolland but his memory was astray and he also added some misconceptions to the Matthewson story. He told Jon Gresham and others that Matthewson had used a recycled aquarium as the pattern for the Yacht Race machine. I was able to scuttle this by finding the design patents for the Matthewson machines including the Yacht Race, Cricket and Football in 1988 after an incredibly tortuous search for the British design patents. These design patents are Cricket No 377195 of 1901, Mermaid Yacht Race 399522 of 1902 and wooden cased Football machine 572441 oddly taken out in 1910 when the machine was patented in 1896."

I got to spend time with the only Yacht Race a handful of times over many years and talk about it for hours with then owner Bob Klepner. I then got to work on two of the recycled mermaids in the US that had been turned into pistol games, Artillery Duel and Shooting Big Game. Also the Castle model or Lighthouse as some people call it. And all the other automatic Sports models in the range. And every one is of a unified and matching design and build. It seems obvious that all of them logically blend together as a cohesive time line.
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daleman
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Re: One Strange Duck

Post by daleman »

...Point 2: Mathewson. Your research re Mathewson is impeccable, well done. However, Fred Bolland was an extremely erudite and likeable old man when I knew him. His memory was excellent. The existence of the design patent does not in fact countermand Fred’s version that the original design was made for an aquarium rather than for a coin machine. His memory was very good and he personally knew everybody who was anybody in the coin machines business from the early 1900’s through to the 1950’s. He knew Mathewson so he would have heard it from the horse’s mouth –why lie? Why make it up?
Facts that are currently verifiable: Mathewson was a concessionary at the Crystal Palace in the 1890s. The Crystal Palace boasted an aquarium which went bankrupt in the 1890s
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gameswat
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Re: One Strange Duck

Post by gameswat »

Daleman, the problem is you have no period evidence for any of this weak story. I'm busy but just did some quick searching online for information about the Crystal Palace aquarium. According to this site, http://www.crystalpalacefoundation.org. ... ium-co-ltd The Crystal Palace Society, formed in 1979 to save the history of the place, I take this quote: "What made the Crystal Palace Aquarium special was the fact that it was a marine and not a freshwater exhibit." The several pen and ink illustrations of the place show no sign of tiny little aquariums. They are all huge built in tanks. The size of these cast iron mermaids as a stand would only make for a very small home size aquarium, and not at all suited to salt water, as apparently they needed a very complex filtering system at the CPA to keep the saltwater fresh. Now as this place was a major tourist attraction why are there no contemporary quotes by anybody to be found about seeing these amazing mermaid tanks all over the place as you state? And why are there no surviving such fish tanks existing in any major collections now, when they didn't go out of usefulness like coin-op machines did? Yet there are a number of the Mermaid machines still existing even though we know that they had a low survival rate. You also state that the 1902 Matthewson design patent doesn't hold any sway, but then this alludes to the fact that the original designer of the "Mermaid Fish Tank" never bothered to patent this truly outstanding piece of design!? Really!?!? I find that staggeringly far fetched. !PUZZLED!

As for why would Bolland make up such a story. Well look at the history of coin-op research. Once a story makes it into print then all sorts of people take it as gospel fact and they get reprinted forever! That's what Dave has been trying to figure out with this site. A story is one thing but hard facts are another. And machines don't usually lie by themselves. I've worked on many hundreds of machines over my 40 year career, with some truly major pieces amongst those, but unless the machines belonged to me personally, then my memory fades awful damn quickly as to the many details. And I often get some of the stories mixed up in my memory. Who's to say where Bolland plucked that story from to begin with? Wherever the story came from, the facts do no stack up well for it. :!?!:
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gameswat
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Re: One Strange Duck

Post by gameswat »

My memory is fading as to the many talks I had with Bob Klepner about the Mathewson machines. But he was the first one who told me that all the machines were cast at the Salter foundry, which he believed was the only one in Britain that could have accomplished such complex work. The patterns for all the series of machines are complex having hollow cores. I've owned three of the early Salter scales and worked on several others and on comparing them with the Mathewson machines they match perfectly, down to using the exact same locks, that I've never seen used anywhere else. Bob has left his coin-op paraphernalia to me and hopefully that will be getting packed up soon for trucking over to Perth. So will be interesting to see what I find as he loved to keep records of everything, unlike myself. Every time I found a new machine I'd ring Bob first and he almost always he had information relating to it in some form or another. Often just a couple days later a package would arrive in the mail with schematics, photos, award and instruction cards or even original parts to copy! But how many machines did I never ask Bob about that he has information on!?!? Like Bolland, Bob also had a fantastic memory in his older age, though having known him for 30 years I did notice he slowed down in the last decade. I could always get the information from him but had to often come at the query from maybe three different directions for him to recall.

Another point about why would Freddie Bolland have lied about his fish tank story. Well, as I stated before, stories tend to get passed on and lose their original context. A classic example that I was able to help resolve was the always stated fact that Mathewson had made the "Try Your Grip", "Try Your Twist" and "Automatic Shooting Range" circa 1895. The great Automatic Pleasures book by Costa states they were all by Mechanical Trading Co. And when you look up the also great Arcades and Slot Machines by Braithwaite he states the same. But on looking closer he thankfully notes where the info came from, and sure enough it's from Automatic Pleasures! Now even Bob who owned two of the machines just took it as true and never bothered to fact check. The query eventually came up on this site and I got my teeth stuck in the problem of finding the missing patents. Amazingly with access to so much information now online, and after going down a rabbit hole of blind alleys, I was able to find all three patents, and not attributed to Mathewson at all, but to Barrett in 1891! Was a very exciting chase to be sure. But just goes to show how easily histories get messed up over time. Would be interesting to know where the Automatic Pleasures attributions came from?
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jingle
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Re: One Strange Duck

Post by jingle »

Great post Rory
I stripped my try your twist of the red and white paint
Over lockdown it took 4 days with a pin and a water based stripper
It had the original green paint underneath
It looks the beeze neeze mate
I’ll send you a pic
Bob
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arrgee
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Re: B Firman & Co. products

Post by arrgee »

I find these in depth discussions regarding the history of machines fascinating.
gameswat wrote:The several pen and ink illustrations of the place show no sign of tiny little aquariums. They are all huge built in tanks.
The print below clearly indicate that the Aquarium did have small tanks, albeit nothing like the cast units in question.

Keep up the research chaps!


Crystal Palace Aquarium.jpg
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Image from the Illustrated London News
pennymachines
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Re: B Firman & Co. products

Post by pennymachines »

arrgee wrote: Tue Nov 29, 2022 12:00 pm I find these in depth discussions regarding the history of machines fascinating.
Me too! !!THUMBSX2!!

On the basis of the evidence presented, against second-hand hearsay, it seems more plausible to me that the Mermaid was purpose designed from scratch by Matthewson as the coin-operated game we know. It would certainly not have looked out of place at the Crystal Palace, but if a case of this pattern was originally made to house fish, we would have to assume it was as a domestic-sized freshwater sideshow alongside the much larger built-in saltwater tanks.

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Crystal Palace Aquarium Co. Ltd wrote:In 1854 the Crystal Palace moved from its temporary site in Hyde Park to its more permanent location at Sydenham. It had only been on the site for twelve years when in 1866 it experienced the first of a number of fires, which destroyed the North Transept. The fire left a large desolate area which had become a charred eyesore. There were insufficient funds to reconstruct the north end and it was not until 1870 that a plan was put before the directors to construct a marine aquarium. The directors saw its potential and the derelict basement site was opened as a salt water aquarium on the 22nd August 1871. The water for the tanks was brought by train from the sea at Brighton.

The aquarium was briefly the largest of its type in the world, holding 120,000 gallons of seawater, of which 100,000 gallons were held in large reservoirs below floor level. There were 60 tanks in all, of which 38 were for the public and the rest for private research. At any one time over 300 species were on display. The aquarium was built on part of the site left vacant by the 1866 Crystal Palace fire and was a popular fad of the day – the first public aquaria had been set up by Phillip Gosse at London Zoo in 1853.
Crystal Palace Aquarium Co. Ltd

If Matthewson worked at Crystal Palace, he would have been familiar with, and could have taken inspiration from, Raffaelle Monti's beautiful sculptural fountains.

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daleman wrote: Wed Nov 23, 2022 8:58 am He knew Mathewson so he would have heard it from the horse’s mouth –why lie? Why make it up?
This raises further problems with the 'fish tank theory': It posits that Matthewson fraudulently registered two designs claiming the work of another as his own (and got away with it) and freely divulged his crimes to Bolland (a well connected member of the amusement machine industry). More likely, Bolland's story was misremembered.

Victorian London - Buildings, Monuments and Museums - Crystal Palace
A Walk through the Nave of the Crystal Palace 1854
Flooding the Exhibition: Oceanic Encounters in the Age of Aquarium
Inventing the aquarium: a short history
Victorian pioneers of the marine aquarium
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bryans fan
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Re: B Firman & Co. products

Post by bryans fan »

pennymachines wrote: Tue Nov 29, 2022 3:33 pm
arrgee wrote: Tue Nov 29, 2022 12:00 pm I find these in depth discussions regarding the history of machines fascinating
Me too! ! !!THUMBSX2!!

And me!👍👏

Lots of sleuthing there PM -/00\- !SHERLOCK!
It's nice to see you acknowledge the sources of your research, from which you have formed your post. It lends it a certain gravitas.
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