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VENDING MACHINES
Vending machines aren't really a part of amusement arcades but they
have their own curious history.
The ancient Greeks invented the first coin operated vending machine – an
urn that dispensed holy water when a coin was inserted, described by Hero
of Alexander in his book ‘Pneumatic’. Machines for vending snuff,
postcards and even a change machine appeared in the late 18th
century, but vending did not become popular until a rash of patents in the
1880s for coin acceptor mechanisms that could distinguish genuine coins
from fakes. Since then, an enormous variety of vending machines have been
tried.
There was a craze for co-operated bars and cafes in
France and Germany in the early 1900s.
There was another craze in the US in the 1950s.
In the UK I vividly remember visiting an automated motorway service
station restaurant near Newcastle in the late 1960s. The hot meals were
stored cold and came out of the vending machine with a plastic 'key'. You
were supposed to put the meal and the key into a microwave cooker.
The the service station was very busy, the keys were very brittle, the
plates came out extremely hot - the result was pandemonium - crying
children, the floor awash with spilt meals, the cookers jammed by broken
bits of key and frantic staff producing ordinary food from round the
back.
.
Its hard to think of anything that someone hasn't tried to sell in a
vending machine
.
 
Its easy to make mechanisms to vend long thin things - but I do worry what
the machine in the middle might be vending
I think Japan probably has more vending machines than
any other country today.
For a collection of pics see:
www.usagichan2.com/
Comiket64/japan-vendingmac...
Including one that vends live lobsters
And these are obviously popular enough in some places to have three in a
row.
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