Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

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treefrog
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by treefrog »

Talking about listing rare parts, did the football mechanism sell as I see it still on the site but the link is broken from the picture? The last I saw it had the single bid of £900. !PUZZLED!
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by badpenny »

Due to the January sales the auction has been extended another month with a reduction starting at seven hundred of your English pounds.
Details Here
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by brigham »

So much for the £900 bid.
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by coppinpr »

£900 was the seller's start price.
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by bob »

Way back on page 6 of this topic I contributed the following:
The other is a much later patent, 196,650, 1922 “Improvements in Coin Operated Machines”. This is a comparatively simpler mechanism and cabinet than Matthewson’s other coin op machines in a wooden cabinet, for a game called “Police Station” or “Jail”.
That this was manufactured and operated by Matthewson was attested to by Matthewson’s step grandson who was interviewed by a friend of mine in the UK sometime around the year 2000. The step grandson remembered the machine and drew a detailed picture of it, similar to that shown in the patent illustration. Perhaps someone has come across such a machine still existing somewhere?

I included an illustration from this patent that I only had the abstract and an illustration of.


Matthewson-Patent-196,650-1923542a.jpg


Today I was going through all the "single" photos on my computer, that is those that were not in folders, when I came across a couple of photos of a machine taken from the front and also the back showing the mechanism. This looked very much like the Matthewson machine patented by him in 1923 (or maybe 1922). So much so that I am convinced that this is Matthewson's 1923 machine. It looks like the patent and also the description of it by his grandson to a friend of mine in the UK who was researching Matthewson's coin op machines with me.

The photos of this machine were taken in March 2002 on a Sony Mavica camera and were automatically saved on my computer hard drive by Eudora which is the the e-mail system I was using at the time. Unfortunately it does not link them to the relevant correspondence, so I don't know who sent them to me from Australia or probably overseas.

Perhaps somebody reading owns this machine or knows who does and probably does not realise that it is Matthewson's last coin op machine.
I also do not have a full copy of the patent describing in detail its operation. It would be helpful to see a full copy of the patent is some kind soul would search for a full copy.
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by gameswat »

But isn't the Mathewson a penny flip game, not a working model? I can't see any sign of the model showing conversion from anything else, or any shared parts? From the Patent wouldn't the Mathewson cabinet have been quite thin, like allwin size dimensions?
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by pennymachines »

bob wrote: Fri Dec 21, 2018 12:01 pm I also do not have a full copy of the patent describing in detail its operation. It would be helpful to see a full copy of the patent is some kind soul would search for a full copy.

It's under Archive/Patents: PAT. No. GB196650 (1923) Mechanical model, Patentee(s): Ernest George Matthewson

I haven't had time to read it, but the first page describes an interesting combination of coin flip game combined with working model, with the possibility of triggering certain actions in the model and returning your coin.
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by bob »

Thanks Mr Pennymachines for the patent. Perhaps when Gameswat has read it in full he'll agree that it could well be the machine. From the photos it looks to me like The Convicts (which is one of the names that Matthewson considered giving it) is about the size and thickness of an Allwin/Wineasy. I don't think it's a conversion, I think it's an original still working as Matthewson intended and created. The fact that I've got the photo would indicate that the machines still exists and is in the possession of a collector.
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by gameswat »

Just had a quick read and look at the Patent and sorry but the only correlation I can see is a prison theme, nothing else as far as i can tell. The photos of the model don't enlarge but it appears to be a typical model mechanism, nothing more or less. The Mathewson Patent is for a for a coin firing game, they make quite a few mentions of Howitzer cannon, which enters on the side of the cabinet, with buckets to catch fired coins and convert that action into figures that disappear or appear into view of a prison barred window. The figures in the model certainly don't tilt into or out of view as the Patent shows in drawing form or what I read in the description. Bob what exactly are the unique features of the Patent that relate to the working model? The model seems to be some kind of execution, certainly doesn't show any signs of player involvement as the Patent states.
Last edited by gameswat on Fri Dec 21, 2018 2:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Matthewson (Automatic Sports Co.) games

Post by gameswat »

OK, just found the same machine photographed in the Hesketh Automata book. His caption states:
Darren Hesketh wrote:The Convicts c.1910. A very early and rare model shows three consecutive scenes of prison life: one convict is making barbed wire, another one marches on the treadmill, while, in the final scene, the convict is being flogged. The central figure also moves. Maker unknown.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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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