Bumper

First game to feature bumpers and they scored 10 points when hit.

The score was kept by a backbox "Totalizer" a coil and ratchet mech that turns a brass disk punched out in 10 point increments and projected onto the back box with a projector with 2 lenses and a light bulb.

Game is coined up with a five cent slide, 5 balls for a nickel.

"Electricity spearheaded additional innovations on pinball machines, with the most important coming from a small Utica, New York, manufacturer called the Pacent Novelty Manufacturing Company. In 1936, an inventor named W. Van Stoeser created a completely new scoring device called the bumper, which Pacent incorporated into a bowling-themed game called Bolo. The game simulated knocking down ten pins represented by the bumpers, ten long, thin rods attached to coil springs. The goal was to make contact with every bumper, and each time the ball hit one, a corresponding pin on the backglass of the cabinet would light up to indicate that the pin had been knocked down. The new bumper concept proved immediately popular, but Pacent did not have centralized manufacturing capability and had to farm out the building of the game to several local companies, leaving an opening for others to fill the void. As a result, when Bally’s Ray Moloney saw the game in operation, he charged a man named Donald Hooker to develop an improved bumper for Bally, which was incorporated into a 1936 table called, appropriately enough, Bumper. Unlike Bolo, Bumper used traditional pinball scoring with bumpers replacing pins and holes and popularized the totalizer method of keeping score, in which a score reel on the backglass updated each time the ball made contact with a bumper. Bally’s Bumper game helped move pinball forward in exciting new directions..."

Alexander Smith, "They Created Worlds: The Story of People and Companies that Shaped the Video Game Industry" Volume I: 1971 - 1982, CRC Press, 2019.

https://videogamehistorian.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/historical-interlude-the-history-of-coin-op-part-3-pinball/