Circling the Square Yipee Tilt!

The average pinball machine collects something over eight dollars worth of nickels a week, and goes through a great deal of trouble in the process. The 40 or 50 of these machines which are distributed throughout a number of quick-eat restaurants surrounding the Square, represent 20 years of constant improvement. They do everything from measuring coins to adding up numbers which would stump a math major; through these electrical gymnastics they have been attracting ever-increasing numbers of students to what may eventually become Harvard's major indoor sport.

Pre-war pinball machines were pretty dull. The balls simply rolled back to the player; accumulating free games was a matter of luck. But the new machines incorporate a pair of mechanical devices which have taken pinball out of the shoot-and-pray classification and given the player a show for his money. One of these is the "live" bumper, essentially an electromagnet surrounding a spring; when touched by a ball it promptly squats down and sends the ball hurtling around the board. The other is the flipper, a little plastic arm controlled by buttons on the flanks of the machine, with which the player can achieve considerable control of the ball.

Most of the Square's pinball machines are owned by a group of Boston distributors, who split the take 50-50 with the stores in which the machines are placed. The amusement company is responsible for servicing the machines, an important job, as an irate student has been known to wreck one when it failed to pay off with free games. Competition by students for the available machines is occasionally keen; during reading period a group of the buzz-and-flash enthusiasts set up a syndicate to hold down a single game, assigning members to occupy it at designated hours of the day.

Pinball is rapidly breaking down into a direct war between distributor and student. A good pinball artist, whom the inhabitants of the pinball-and-cheeseburger emporiums like to call a "fifty-mission-man," frequently can accumulate free games all afternoon on one nickel; the distributors are constantly making the machines more difficult.

One victory for the manufacturers and the distributors has been the near-elimination of slugs from the intake of the machines. Pre-war games used to glean an inordinate number of foreign coins, carefully shaped discs of tinfoil, and Louisiana sales-tax tokens. But the application of electronic research to the coin slot has made it so selective that it is now apt to balk at a well-worn Buffalo nickel unless it is carefuly coaxed into position. Other complicated circuits have eliminated a former unfortunate tendency for the machines to run away and start distributing free games indiscriminately.

The chief weapon of the manufacturers is a little plumbline which hangs inside a small circle of wire; when the weight at the end is deflected enough to touch the circle it completes a circuit, and a polite little sign on the scoreboard says "Tilt," or in the case of one popular machine using a Western theme, "Yipee Tilt!" Even this device is often insufficient however. A veteran "fifty-mission-man" can hit the machine vertically and bounce a ball back up the playing board without tilting it. Another technique, still more refined, is bodily lifting the whole machine and propping the front legs on the player's feet or a brace of matchbooks; this will tilt the machine for the first nickel, but in subsequent games the balls will wobble slowly down the reduced incline and produce game after game.

Just why students flock to the pinball game is still uncertain. David Myers, a Boston distributor, claims it is because "there is a little larceny in everybody," that the player cannot resist trying to get something for nothing. Another operator says that pinball gives the little man a chance to compete in a game of skill with an athlete. Last year a Social Relations student found that most students claimed they played to "waste time." But the owner of the Holyoke Street grill in which much Harvard pinball activity centers has different ideas. "They give the boys a nice place to hang around," he says, "when they can't afford the Fly Club."