A History of Vending Machines, From Chewing Gum to 90-Second Pasta
Move over, boring old office vending machine! There's a fresh game in town. New vending machines not only reheat frozen pizza on command, they can actually knead the dough and make the entire pie from scratch. Other machines allow you to buy fresh, fancy cupcakes, can cook perfectly al dente pasta to order, and let you customize your own Oreo cookies—truly Jetsonian stuff.
Vending machines have come a long way from the days—specifically, the late 1800s—when they were penny-operated and primarily sold cigarettes, peanuts, and other little trinkets. Heck, in the middle of the century, it was an uphill climb to figure out how to get a machine to make a decent cup of coffee. Here, we honor the humble origins of the vending machine, and the twists and turns the technology has taken during its 130 years in the United States.
Library of Congress1/21The first patent for an automatic vending device was filed in Britain in 1857, according to Kerry Segrave's Vending Machines: An American Social History, one of the few books dedicated to the topic. The British patent was for a machine that would automatically dispense stamps, not food.
USPTO.gov2/21The idea for a vending machine crossed the Atlantic shortly thereafter, and W.H. Fruen filed the first U.S. patent for a vending machine, inexplicably shaped to resemble a building in miniature, in 1884. It was supposed to work like this: When a coin was dropped into a slot in the machine, a lever would fall, which would cause the coin to roll off. That would open a valve that would dispense liquid into a cup (seen here on the front steps of the building). Fruen's design was never mass marketed, but the spread of vending machines across the country wasn't far behind.
USPTO.gov3/21In 1888, vending machines selling Tutti-Frutti brand gum were deployed in New York's train stations, according to Segrave. Pictured here is an illustration from an 1894 patent that was transferred to the Tutti Frutti Automatic Vending Company. It used a "delivery slide" to dispense the product to the customer. Speaking to the rapid spread of the machines, in 1911, 18 major vending machine companies consolidated into the giant Autosales Gum and Chocolate Company. World domination ensued (maybe).
ArnoldReinhold at the English language Wikipedia4/21In their early decades, operators of vending-machines had to deal with a serious scourge: Slugs—and not the garden variety. Early vending machines were terrible at distinguishing between coins from the U.S. Mint and frauds made of other metals, wood, or sometimes even ice. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, laws were passed banning the manufacture of objects designed to mimic coins; around the same time, vending-machine technology improved so that the machines were better able to detect and reject mimics.
USPTO.gov5/21John Sharnik, a New York Times reporter, described in 1950 how the latest slug-detecting technology worked: “Its [the vending machine's] ‘brain’ is a coin receptacle in the form of a channel, or group of channels, containing trip levers which yield only to objects of certain sizes, shapes and weights," he wrote. "With the magnets that line the channels, it can also bite a slug or counterfeit and fling it back at a would-be chiseler. When the coin is genuine, the machine goes gratefully into its act. The trip-levers spring a lock—either mechanically or by the closing of an electrical circuit—and, depending on the kind of commodity, a valve opens and starts pouring liquid, or a single package is dealt gently off the bottom of a vertically stacked deck." Magnets, in other words, would detect when the metal composition of a coin someone was trying to use didn't match its government-issued counterpart. This image is of a 1939 patent for a magnet-based vending machine coin selector.
USPTO.gov6/21As machine technologists battled fraudsters, they also sought new ways to provide food and drink through the machines. Cold-beverage vending machines that sold bottled soda, cooled by ice, were introduced in the 1930s, and before World War II were accompanied by machines that used electricity to stay cool. According to Segrave, by 1942, "tens of thousands of bottled soft drink machines were a familiar sight at grocery stores, service stations, and other locations across America."
Flickr user <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/teddysphotos/5160202936">Ted Hodges</a>7/21Soft-drink giants Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola entered into bidding wars to exclusively serve certain communities, and each got into the vending industry by developing innovations like the six-pack vending machine (Pepsi) and low-cost coolers (Coca-Cola), according to Vending Machines: An American Social History.
USPTO.gov8/21Paper-cup soda machines were also prominent in the 1930s. Rather than producing a bottle, these would mix a flavor of soda with carbonated water to order or dispense drinks from already-carbonated tanks into a paper cup waiting for the customer. This patent illustration shows one possible setup.
Library of Congress9/21Early machines offered single products, like peanuts, gumballs, or one kind of soda. An exciting development in the 1920s and 1930s was the introduction of choice into the vending world, or vending machines that offered multiple items.
USPTO.gov10/21This marked the beginning of the spread of the type of machines we picture when we think about vending machines today. The image here, from a patent filed in 1929, is of a machine that could sell bottles in different varieties.
USPTO.gov11/21There may have been more options in soda vending by the 1940s, but one choice was often unavailable: coffee, the successful production of which by machine had bedeviled the industry for years. One of the first machines to produce a palatable cup of joe was developed in the late 1940s. That machine automatically mixed a liquid coffee concentrate with hot water, Cyrus Melikian, one of the inventors, told Vending Times in 2001. But creating palatable coffee remained a challenge for many manufacturers over the years, says Segrave. A later solution, single-cup coffee machines that relied on “pods” of ground, roasted coffee beans, was introduced in the 1960s and also developed by Melikian.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulsedra/12/21It wasn't until 1960 that vending machines began accepting dollar bills. The New York Times, reporting on an early model manufactured by ABT Corporation in 1957, said the inventor “predicted that his device would revolutionize the vending machine industry.” Bill changers used a magnetic head to read the ink on the dollar bill, a later Times story said. By the late 1980s, machines could make change for $5 and $10 bills and bill changers could distinguish between Treasury ink and the copier ink found on counterfeit money.
Ore Ida13/21Wrapping up a century that saw the creation of palatable, automated coffee and the vending machine's acceptance of the dollar bill was a period of experimentation in the vending world, this time with cooking. The New York Times reported in 1989 that Ore-Ida Foods, the potato giant, was working on a machine that would flash-fry french fries in hot oil, although the newspaper noted that “its introduction has been delayed by product quality and maintenance problems.” The Ore-Ida french fry machine was finally making the trade show rounds in 1994, according to the Associated Press, but it ended up using pre-fried french fries that were warmed by a "patented hot air cooking technique."
EatWave14/21By the mid-2000s, combination-product vending machines that sold cold drinks and food or frozen meals and ice cream were on the rise, according to an industry report. But the first combination vending-cooking machine was a few years away: That came in 2009, when the EatWave was introduced. The machine's inventors wanted to create a machine that would sell hot, cold, and room-temperature items, providing an entire meal from a single machine. At the bottom of the machine is a microwave with doors on the top and the bottom. They open, allowing cold food to pass through without being zapped, and they swing shut, stopping hot food for a brief reheating session on its way down the chute. About 250 have been sold in the United States today, O’Neil Sawh, the company's chief technical officer, estimates. A small EatWave machine costs $8,495.
