Saratoga
Williams, 1948I know some of you folks out there can enlighten me - I'm trying to find out what the first pinball machine was that had powered bumpers - jet/pop/thumper bumpers. I think the first one that had dead bumpers was "Bolo" in July of 1936, followed a few months later by Bally's "Bumper". But which machine had the powered variety of bumpers first?
Williams Saratoga 1948
Saratoga' was the first machine to feature an active bumper of the type that used a metal ring to repel the ball, identified in the manufacturer's flyer as a thumper bumper. This style of active bumper would soon replace the ones using a compressed spring to repel the ball, found in other games at the time. The earliest spring compression bumpers were found on Stoner's 1938 'Super-Zeta' and Stoner's 1938 'Zipper'.
Was looking at a video before checking IPDB https://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?name=Saratoga&sortby=name&searchtype=advanced#2055
They didn't mention Saratoga but was still fun to watch 
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Charlottesville, VA