The History of Vending Machines

in the alpha build. It hasn't even entered beta testing yet. This is the survival crafting game the zombie game called Seven Days to Die, So, as you would imagine, you're a survivor in a zombie apocalypse and you have to cobble together a way to survive and perhaps even thrive in a world where every seven days, hordes of zombies run straight at you, no matter where you're high. They know exactly where you are, and they move super fast

to come and get you anyway. One of the important things in that game is that there are vending machines where you can purchase food and drinks and medications that will help you survive. I have no idea who in the game is restocking all those vending machines. I mean, some of them are located where there are traders, like as in people who trade, but there are other vending machines. You'll just find random buildings and they still seem to have a stock and they work. So that's kind of interesting.

But it got me to thinking I should do an episode about sort of the history of vending machines. They have been around for a really long time, and it's a clever way to offer a scaled down shopping experience without having to mind the store all day. You can even design your machine in such a way that it attracts people and acts like a salesperson and you don't

have to pay them. So today we're going to talk about the history and a little bit about the technology of vending machines, and that history stretches back further than you might think, unless you've looked into this before, in

which case you know where I'm going. So you might think about visions of like automats in the nineteen fifties, and you know old cigarette machines prior to nineteen ninety seven here in the United States, where they were made illegal out of the concern that you know, people under age could just purchase cigarettes by putting enough money in there and pulling a lever. But we actually have to go much further back, all the way back to the first century of the common era in Egypt, specifically in

the city Alexandria. So in that city was a dude named Hero or Huron sometimes. But Hero was kind of a tinkerer and a thinker. He was an engineer and an inventor. He experimented with all sorts of clever and sometimes danger devices, and among his gadgets and gizmos of plenty was the very first vending machine that we are aware of. I mean, maybe someone made one before Hero did, but this is the first one on record, because who knows.

People didn't write everything down. But Hero's invention is one that we do know of what. We don't know whether or not he actually ever built it, but we know he designed it. And it was a pretty simple idea when you get down to it. Now. When one would go and visit a holy temple back in those days, one was expected to wash one's hands in holy water, and Hero came up with a way to dispense holy water while also earning money for the temple. He designed

a holy water dispenser, a holy water vending machine. That is a wild thing to say, but here's how it worked. The dispenser, which looked kind of like a big urn in the drawings I've seen, had a spiggot that was toward the bottom, so that's obviously where the water would come out, and the dispenser would obviously hold the holy

water inside it. There was a valve on the inside of this device that, when it was shut, would keep the spigot closed, and if the worshiper were to PLoP a coin into a slot in the top of the machine, the coin would fall inside the machine and it would land on a pan that was near the coin slot. That pan was actually at the other end of a lever. This lever would then be attached to a pivot point, and on the other side of the pivot point the fulcrum. In other words, on the other side of the fulcrum,

it had a connection to that valve. So if you were to press down on the pan inside this machine, it would cause the lever on the valve side to go up and thus open the valve and allow water to flow through the spigot. The weight of the coin was all it would take. The coin would hit this pan. That would add weight to the pan. The pan would start to tilt downward, the valve side would go up,

water would come out. Now, Hero actually was fairly clever, Not just fairly, he was extremely clever on how much water would actually dribble out per coin, Like, how do you keep that to a specific amount or at least

a general amount. Well, the weight of the coin would be enough for the pan to start going down, but it would just keep going down until it would reach a steep enough angle where the coin would slide off the pan and land in another little coin bucket that's inside this urn, you know, presumably held above the the container of water. Now with a coin slid free of the pan, now the pan's no longer heavy enough to

hold down the lever. It tilts back up. The valve side comes down, which means the valve closes again and it shuts off the water. Your water dispensation is complete. You now have the holy water needed to wash your hands and go and you know, worship whichever god the temple was devoted to. Again, I don't know if Hero ever actually built this device, but he definitely described it.

He had a work that loosely translated means mechanics and optics, and he described it within that work, and there's no reason it couldn't work. There's no reason he couldn't have built it. It was based off of very simple mechanism. Now you would have to get the weights just right for the lever and to minimize the chance of a coin, you know, just hitting the pan and rolling off and then nothing happens, although I guess you could always blame

it on the fickle gods at that point. There also would have been no way for the machine to differentiate coins or exactly what had pressed down on that plate. So, in other words, if you were to somehow fit something that could go into that slot and push down on that pan, then you could get your holy water and

not spend a coin doing it. So you could use like a dummy coin, you know, the old slug routine, as they would call it, a slug to represent a coin, and you could get a blast of holy water for free. Although that doesn't seem like it's really keeping in spirit with the purpose of the machine. But you know, it's also weird to make holy water dispensation a transactional process in the first place. If you ask me, I don't know. I'm not very religious, so it's hard for me to

even say. Anyway, as a design, Hero's machine was pretty darn neat. It might not have been too practical, however, because coins were not uniform in weight or roundness. They were not even in broad circulation at the time, so it wasn't even necessarily likely that the worshippers would even have coins on them. But it does show Hero's ingenuity, and it would be the for vending machines. It's just that it would take some time before you would get

to another one. So we enter into a bit of a dry spell, not just because we're no longer talking about holy water. It's not like Hero came up with this invention and then next thing you know, you know, you had vending machines throughout the ancient and medieval world that would to spend stuff like garum and olive, zenda and hummus and you know, chainmail, like you didn't have

those all over the place. It would take more than a thousand years actually, before we would start getting into descriptions of devices that we might group together in the family of vending machines. So next up, based on lots of different accounts. By the way, it's really hard to track down good, definitive sources for this. There are a lot of sources that all echo the same points, but it feels like they're all kind of drawing from each other as opposed to, you know, finding a really good

historian who has really done the work here. But there are historical accounts in various documents and things like patent filings, that kind of thing where we can trace sort of a development. But the next one is one that's a little it's not quite a vending machine as we would think of it. It's not like it's fully automated. And also it was portable. And another thing that's interesting is that our first vending machine dispensed holy water, so it's

only fitting that the second vending machine dispenses tobacco. It's snuff. So at this point we're in England and we're in the sixteen hundreds, so seventeenth century, and there were these devices that some pubs had that were known as honesty boxes, and this would be in jolly Old England, and patrons of this pub could purchase a pinch of snuff or tobacco, and what they would do is they would flag down a bartender or server who would bring around this, you know,

a fairly sizable brass box. The top of the box was a pair of hinged lids, so think of like a hinge in the center and either end of the box opens for half of the box. So you had two compartments inside the box, one under each lid. So one compartment would serve as the coin receptacle, which would be locked in place. Obviously, you don't want patrons getting into that and getting their grubby little hands and all the coins you've been selecting. The other box was what

would now hold the tobacco. So on top of these boxes there would be a coin slot and a plunger, so you would put a haypenny a halfpenny in the slot, and when you push the plunger down, that would allow the coin to slide into the box, into the receptacle, and at the same time that also allowed a mechanism inside the box to shift and unlatch the hinged lid that was on top of the tobacco or snuff or whatever.

So you put a coin in, you push the plunger down and then the side with the tobacco in it unlatches and the little lid pops up, so you can take a pinch of tobacco or snuff, only a pinch. That's what you were supposed to do. That's why they were called honesty boxes, so it was kind of on the honor system, although you would also typically have like a bartender or server watching your every move to make sure you weren't like stealing all the tobacco for just

a haypenny. And then once done, the bar employee would push down on the lid on the tobacco side and it would latch back into place and it be ready for the next coin. Like Heroes Invention, this one was purely mechanical, and y'all, it took me a while to search around and find information on one of these. There are a lot of sources that mention them, but again

they're all pretty much the same. However, I did track down and antiques site that actually had some examples of honesty boxes and including photographs of them, so I could actually take a good look at pictures of these things.

So I can't go into great detail about the mechanisms because it wasn't like they were detailing that, but I get the general idea that pushing down that plunger and allowing the coin to go through activated the mechanism that unlatched the other lid, and without a coin, the plunger would not go down all the way, so it would keep the tobaccos safe from unsavory types who were just pretending to put a haypenny in. Okay, we're going to

take a quick break. When we come back, I'm going to talk about a trouble maker and a free thinker and a radical who believed, get this, that all human beings should have the same rights, and why he's associated with vending machines. But first, let's take a quick break. Okay, I promised y'all the story of a radical, someone who thought that everyone should have the same rights, whether they

happened to be male or female. I assume back in those days that he did not recognize the concept of non binary, but still for the time, it was rather radical and for the place as well. We are talking about Robert Carlyle c R L I L E. Because I don't want you to get him mixed up with the character who is in Downton Abbey as a very

different character, although both of them were in the print business. Anyway, English authorities viewed Robert Carlyle as being dangerous or at the very least a real nuisance, a thorn in their side. And that's because, like I said, Carlisle was promoting these dangerous ideas like women are human beings and therefore they should have the same rights the men do, or that the average poor person has just as many rights as

someone of the English nobility. These were not the sorts of ideas and philosophies that the English authorities cared for, but they are the ones that Carlisle believed in. And he opened a bookshop that sold books and pamphlets about these things and kind of spread and promoted these ideas that the English government viewed as radical. So the government was not keen on this at all, and they had

put into place some rather restrictive censorship laws. So if you were found selling books about you know, this illegal material and promoted these ideas that the government found distasteful and disruptive, then you could be investigated and carted off to jail. And Carlisle actually did get carted off to jail a couple of times. His wife did too, in fact, because she took up his cause while her husband was

in prison. That this meant that their baby spent some time in the houscal because she was pregnant when she was arrested, and then delivered her baby while in prison. So Yauza. So Carlisle thought he had come up with a fairly clever workaround for these British censorship laws that said, you know, it was illegal to sell this material to customers. I don't know that the material itself was illegal, but the act of selling it was. So he commissioned a

machine that would dispense books, a book vending machine. I wish I could tell you how this machine worked, but I could not dig up a description of the actual mechanisms, if in fact there were any, But I do know it worked from the point of the view of the customer.

So the idea is that you would walk up to this machine, and the machine had a face on it, kind of like a clock face with a dial in the center as opposed to you know, hands of a clock, and around the clockface would be titles of banned books, and you could then turn the dial to the title of the work that you were interested in. You would PLoP in the appropriate coins into the coin slot, and the machine would release a copy of the illegal material

into your hot little hands. And no human had actually overseen the transaction, so thought Carlyle he had a loophole. No one had actually sold the illegal material. It was dispensed by a machine. The British authorities weren't having any of it. While the history of English law has no shortage of examples where someone was, on a technicality, able to prove that they had only violated the spirit but not the letter of the law, in Carlisle's case that

ended up being a non starter. The authorities agreed that no human had sold the book at the moment of exchange, but they still would hold whomever loaded the machine with copies of the works responsible for the sale. Carlisle didn't give up on his support for freedom of the press and equal rights, but he would pay for it time

and again with various stints in jail. And there's also, you know, so little information on Carlisle's machine other than the fact that it existed, that it's entirely possible it was not automated at all. Instead, I mean, it's possible it could have been essentially a mechanical turk. You might

remember the story of the mechanical Turk. A clever inventor slash magician created this device that looked like it was an automaton, but in fact was a gadget that was puppeteered by someone who was hiding inside the workings of the machine but was hidden from view, and so in fact it wasn't an automated machine at all. It was something that was under the control of a person. It's possible that the same thing was going on with Carlisle's

quote unquote machine. That maybe there was just an employee who paid attention to the dials setting and then upon receiving the money, would just slide a book down a chute, and so it was just the appearance of a vending machine. That's possible. I don't know the answer one way or

the other. All that being said, if you were to flip ahead a century or so, because this was happening in the in the nineteenth century, the mid nineteenth century with Carlisle's book, that's how late those censorship laws were taking effect. Well, if you were to go to the twentieth century, then into the twenty first century, you would find the biblio Matt. This is a vending machine, a book vending machine that you can find in a bookstore

that's in Toronto, Canada. The bookstore is called the Monkey's Paw and for the princely sum of a touney. A toney is a two dollars Canadian coin. You can PLoP a tuney in and out will come one of as the machine proclaims, one hundred and twelve million titles, which is very clever. Obviously, whatever is going to come out is what has been loaded into the machine for that day. But you know the joke being it could be anything out of any of the books that have been published.

So what actually comes out is not up to you. You don't get to choose. You just get whatever is next. So you could end up with a really odd book. You could end up with a rare edition of a book. Some cases, maybe it's a biography about Lawrence Welk. The owner of the shop loads the machine up with all sorts of odds and ends. There's actually a great little

video on Vimeo showing the bibliomat in action. The added bonus is that It also has Tom Waits's song Step Right Up as part of the soundtrack, which is awesome.

The device itself is really clever. When it's activatd some shelves inside the machine that are on a little pulley system will move, so they get lifted up into place, and in the process the shelves they can tilt, so when they're pulled up far enough, the lip of the shelf will catch in the machine and it will start to tilt, and it tilts enough so that whatever volume is on top will slide off and go down the chute to the receptacle where the customer can pick up

and see whatever book it was that they just purchased. I love this idea. By the way, there are also other really clever vending machines or repurposed vending machines that dispense stuff like art and literature, and I love it to me. It's one of those brilliant uses of technology. It's a bit of a curiosity, but it leads to

delight and I think that's phenomenal. I'll talk about another one before we get to the end of this episode, but moving on, so now we're up to eighteen fifty and we see another Englishman, this one named Simeon Denham, who filed a patent for a device that he created

that was intended to dispense postage stamps. Denham's idea was to locate these machines in places that had a lot of foot traffic, like train stations, but were not necessarily convenient to a post office, so you could easily buy a stamp when you were near one of these machines, not that different from the postage stamp machines that we

see today. In May of eighteen fifty eight, the newspaper The Times published an article describing Denham's device, saying, quote, the instrument was intended for the delivery of postage or other stamps singly to purchasers, so as to dispense, what with the attendance of an official for this purpose at

post offices. A penny being put into a hole near the top unlocks the instrument and allows a handle to be used in such an extent as to protrude from between two rollers a single stamp, which the purchaser tears off. One stamp only can be had at a time, and a haypenny or smaller coin is rejected pretty clever doesn't

go into the actual mechanics. Again. That is one of the issues with a lot of these stories is that you just hear that they were made, or at least were designed, but you don't get a whole lot of detail about the actual systems that were being used at that point. This one, at least we got the rollers, which makes sense, Like the rollers put pressure and when

they move together extend a stamp. By controlling how far the rollers can turn, you can make sure that it only allows you access to a single stamp for the amount of money you put in. Thus, so you can control how many units the customer can get. That stuff all makes sense, but it's the barest of details, right. Apparently, the patent awarded to Denim is number seven hundred and six. I tried to track it down so I could get

a better idea the working mechanism. All I could really find were records where the patent would be stored in physical form, and I'm not in England, so I can't just pop over to the the respective library and dig it up. According to several sources, Denim secured a provisional patent but never pursued a full patent, so it is also it's possible that this version of the vending machine never got beyond the hey, you know what would be a really good idea phase of invention that is more

common than I would care for. By the eighteen eighties, things had gone beyond just good ideas, and engineers in places like Germany and England began create creating actual early vending machines. One in England created a vending machine designed to either dispense envelopes and stamps, or you could choose to purchase an already stamped postcard. In America, a guy named W. H. Freud if r u E N file the patent for a device that, upon insertion of a coin,

would dispense some mineral water. I did look over that patent, I could actually find that one, and I'm left with a feeling that it's not that different from Hero of Alexandria's old Holy water dispenser. It's a little more complicated,

actually a lot more complicated. They're more moving parts and stuff, but the basic idea is essentially the same that by putting coins into the machine, you end up changing the device so that or you make changes in the device so that a valve opens up and liquid dispenses out, in this case mineral water. Also. Freud's version of this was to design the dispenser in such a way that it looked like a like a brownstone building. It looked

like a building. It didn't look like, you know, a tank or anything like that, although there was obviously a tank inside the device I used to hold the mineral water. But yeah, it was a weird looking thing. I recommend checking it out if you get a chance to do a search on w H. Freud, fr u E N and mineral water vending machine. It's a cool patent. Okay, we are now on the precipice of the true age of vending machines. We're going to take another quick break.

When we come back, i'll talk about the explosion of creativity that would follow in the late eighteen hundreds and into the twentieth century. We're back, and as I said just before the break, the real dawning of the vending machine age can be traced to eighteen eighty eight and the two D fruity machine. Yep, too dy fruity a wamp bomp aloo bomp a womp bamboom so tooty fruity

references chewing gum. That's a fruity flavor of chewing gum that was being sold primarily in the northeastern United States. And there was this guy named Thomas Adams who invented a flavor of chewing gum called two D Fruity. He also did a spearmint, blackjack clove flavored chewing gums. But he also patented and created a two D Fruity gum machine.

And it had a coin slot, and it had a shelf for the product to land in, and had two levers, so when you would put a coin in the slot and press the levers down, it activated the mechanism inside which would allow a piece of gum to fall down a chute and land in the little dispenser shelf for someone to pick up. They were not terribly reliable, according to to contemporary reports that they were often not working properly.

You know, sometimes someone would shove something into a coin slot that gummed it up for everyone, or just got jammed, or it was empty, but there was no way of telling it was empty until after you had put a coin in and pushed believers down, and then there's no way to get your coin back, So they definitely had issues, but according to at least some reports, they were pretty

darn popular. He put a lot of vending machines on places like along the New York City subway system, along the platforms for the subways, and so people would get to the subway, they'd be waiting on a train, and meanwhile there'd be this little machine where they could get a nice tasty piece of two D fruity gum for just a penny, and it wasn't socially inacceptable to chew gum,

so you could actually do that and help pass some time. Yeah, it turned out that would be a real foot hold for vending machines, and yeah, it got to a point where it inspired a lot of other shop owners to

do something similar. A lot of the early innovation were in things like how to make sure that you had the right coins being used, because once you get past the penny slot type stuff, you know, if you're talking about things that cost more than a penny, like it's maybe ten cents or five cents, then figuring out ways to accept different kinds of coins would become part of

the challenge. And there were lots of interesting mechanical systems here, because remember this is before we get into electronics, and those mechanical systems would include things like you know, like a ratchet gear which can turn in one direction, but because of a poll, cannot turn the other way. This is that clicking noise you hear when you use like an old school gum machine, like a gumball machine, you put a coin in, you start turning. You hear that

click click, click, click click noise. That's the poll clicking against the ratchet. It is the ratchet is angled in such a way where you can turn the handle one way, like clockwise from your perspective, but you can't turn it the opposite direction. It prevents it from going back the other way. Or building a machine that relies on gravity. Gumball machines are another good example. Like don't make it

more complicated that it needs to be. Use the physical laws to your advantage, where nature herself is replenishing the supply for the next piece available. So like in a candy bar machine, that'd be a stack of candy bars in it, and activating the device would allow what candy bar to slide through, but it also would mean that gravity would pull everything else down, So that the next candy bar is in position for whomever uses the machine next.

Really really clever stuff to like minimize the amount of mechanics that you need for making one of these machines work at a basic level. Obviously, later you go, the

more complicated these machines would get. It would not take very much time at all for people to try and figure out ways to cheat vending machines to use like a slug, for example, which is just something that's about the same size and weight as a coin, but it's not a coin, like a hollowed out disk of steel, for example, it's often a disc because you could tie a string through the whole of the disk and then potentially retrieve your slug for use again to just cheat

a machine out of all of its supply. So a lot of innovation was then dedicated to ways to try and prevent people from cheating. So one thing that started going into machines were really powerful magnets, which wouldn't really affect regular coins because there's not enough ferromagnetic material in them for it to make a big difference. But if you're using like steel slugs, they would be pulled the magnet and get caught there, so you wouldn't activate the machine.

I Meanwhile, like when the vendor would come and open things up, they could clear all the slugs out, So that would be one way. But there were also ways where they would develop systems that would essentially detect the size and weight of coins to allow the right coins to go through and to deny the wrong coins from going through. So, for example, when you get into the nickel and dime era, a lot of those machines would

not accept pennies. They would accept nickels and dimes, and that's it, And so the slot would be big enough for a nickel to fit through, but not for something like a quarter or a half dollar or something like that to go through. Pennies, however, are slightly larger than dimes, but they're smaller than nickels. So how do you account for those? How do you get it so that a

machine can tell the difference between a penny and a dime. Well, one thing you can do is build essentially a track that the coins go down, where the track has holes in it, and those holes are large enough for a dime to fit through, but not for a penny or a nickel. And then a little further down the track, you have holes that a penny can fit through but not a nickel, and you have the dimes divert to a path that activates the machine. You have the nickels

divert to a path that will activate the machine. Pennies will end up going down a chute that's to the return coin slot, so you don't end up counting the pennies as dimes. Pretty clever, simple approach, but limited as time would go on. You would have other methods to do this sort of thing, where you would have optical sensors and electromagnets inside a machine to detect coins and make sure they are the correct coins to go through.

So you know, optical sensors could measure the size of a coin as it rolls past, now, measuring the diameter of the coin and determining, all right, well that's a quarter, you know, because these would be very precise these days, our coins are uniform in shape and weight and consistent.

And see, the electromagnet would determine exactly what kind of metals were used to make that coin, So again you could prevent fakes from going through, even if those fakes were the same size and weight of legitimate coins, right, because if unless they're made of the exact same stuff, in which case they might as well be a coin, then you're you're not going to fool the machine. Later on, you would have, you know, pending machines that clearly could

accept paper currency. These typically have a simple optical system in them where they can detect the note has been put in, using various stuff like ultraviolet light and other mythod methods for looking for the telltale signs of is this an acceptable form of currency or not. It's not like it's you know, detecting forgeries or whatever. It's just saying, okay, well does this match what I am allowed to accept as payment or if it doesn't, I reject it and

the little dollar comes rolling right back out. So if your dollars really dirty or are hard to read because it's been crumpled up so much, it may not be accepted by a vending machine because the sensors cannot verify that it's a real dollar bill. And then even later still you have vending machines that work with things like credit and debit cards, And we started to get into the realm of the crazy super modern machines. But those early ones, to me, are really fascinating because again, they

were largely mechanical systems. Even when you get into the nineteen twenties where they started to get electrified, and then you get into the nineteen fifties and sixties where they started getting a little more sophisticated, a lot of the actual operations of the machines were mechanical systems, and to me, that's really just cool because so much of what we work with and interact with today are digital systems that we can kind of forget the engine new that went

into creating these mechanical devices that could dole out stuff for whatever money we put in, and that stuff is all sorts of things, right. They've made vending machines for crazy stuff. I mean, like even early on, like in the eighteen hundreds, Paris had vending machines that were connected to the city's water system and you could go and purchase quarts of water. Hot water in Paris vending machines

that were connected to the system. So maybe you don't have a water furnace at home, you could buy hot water and then carry it home for use, which was kind of interesting. Or in England, in Birmingham, England. They had the gas company came up with a clever way of making people pay to you know, stay warm and

not die in the winter. They had systems set up with gas pipes where you would put in a coin for a certain amount of cubic volume of natural gas for the purposes of heating, and that would just essentially allot that amount to you until the amount ran out, and then you'd have to put more money in if you wanted to maintain heat. But there were tons of different vnting machines and still are in some places. Japan is famous for its vending machines and for its variety

of vending machines. There were vending machines that dispensed alcohol, which, as you can imagine, could easily be abused. Cigarettes very common until the nineteen nineties here in the United States, still common in some places but not here in the US. In fact, I saw a great video of an artist in the Carolinas who has taken cigarette machines and turned them into art dispensing machines. So you come up to one and you look at the different art that is available.

You put in five dollars, you pull a lever and it dispenses the art and it's called the Arto Mattic and they apparently have been populating various places, including as far away as Australia. I have never seen one of these, but I think it's a cool idea. It's very similar to the bibliomatic that I mentioned earlier in the episode. But yeah, you'd find them for stuff like perfume or for soap or soup, and that one letter makes a

big difference. I saw one that was hot curry over rice, and that was interesting too because that machine that I saw on a video, it was a Japanese machine that served hot curry on rice. The machine did not have a microwave in it some of the machines that serve hot food. The way that works is the machine is designed to microwave your selection and then give you a

hot meal. This one had heating elements inside the machine because it was it predated microwaves, so using electricity it kept everything hot and you would have to have someone cook rice, portion it out in bowls, put the bowls

inside the machine. At the beginning of the day. It held pouches of curry and when you put the money in the machine would hold the pouch in place, a knife would slice the pouch open, and it would squeeze the pouch on top of a bowl of this cooked rice and then serve you curry over rice, which I just thought was really clever. But there's been tons of other stuff, Like I saw in one video that supposedly there were vending machines out in the Western United States

that sold divorce papers. That's pretty enterprising. Or you know a car, you would buy the keys to a car through a vending machine, which is again crazy, but yeah, there's no shortage of those. And like, there's so many different kinds with different delivery systems. To talk about how they all work would get pretty long winded and repetitive in many ways. The one thing I will say is that there are classic snack machine here in the United States,

the ones that have the spirals. The way those work is when you make your selection, then a motor that's behind all the selections behind those bars engages with the mechanism that connects to that curved bar that holds the snacks in place, and then it rotates it three hundred and sixty degrees. So there's essentially an axle that plugs in to some gears that then are connected to the spiral.

It rotates the spiral three hundred and sixty degrees, which is supposed to dispense a treat now, whatever the snack is.

Typically there's some sort of optical system towards the bottom of these vending machines that can detect whether or not something went through, and if nothing went through, some of these machines will then do a second rotation of that wire just in case something had been like accidentally mis installed, or maybe two things came out the last rotation, and so there's a gap and then hopefully your potato chips or popcorn or whatever it might be falls through and

you can pick it up. But yeah, there's so many different mechanisms and so many different varieties. I went through a long rabbit hole of watching videos of vending machines, which ended up not being very useful for this episode, but it was really entertaining. So if you ever want to just waste a few hours watching you know, ridiculous vending machine footage, there's no shortage of it online, I'm happy to tell you. And that's it. That's it for

this little look at the history of vending machines. Like I said, like the real history of the modern day vending machine can be traced back to the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds. I would say that the heyday was probably the fifties and sixties. It's when we saw

like the rise of the automat. That would have been the restaurants that you could go to where you could get things like a sandwich or a piece of pie or whatever by putting some money into a slot and then opening up a drawer and pulling out your selection and sitting down and never interacting with another human being. I know a lot of people personally who would love it if everything they ever had to get was an a vending machine so they never had to interact with

other human beings. I am not that person, but I understand where they're coming from. Yeah, anyways, super cool stuff. You can totally check out more videos on YouTube, and I sure hope you do, because, like I said, there are a lot of really entertaining ones. That's it. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts you listen to your favorite shows,