A Killer In Our Midst
A curious statistic, that vending machines kill four times more people than sharks do, piqued my interest. Its source, a 1995 report from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, revealed that since 1978 at least thirty-seven Americans had been killed rocking or tilting a faulty vending machine, a death toll of 2.18 per annum. The average annual mortality rate rose to four between 2002 and 2015, according to a later report. A fully laden vending machine, weighing between 180 and four hundred kilograms, is not to be messed with.
With no comparable statistics for the United Kingdom, killer vending machines might be a uniquely American phenomenon, a deadly illustration of the quip that “change is inevitable – except from a vending machine”. At least their gradual conversion to contactless forms of payment is eliminating the usual source of frustration, coin in, nothing out.
Britain has over 420,000 vending machines, roughly one for every fifty-five of us, from which approximately seven billion items are dispensed a year, generating a turnover of around £1.54 billion. Nearly a third (31%) of all sales are drinks, with eight million cups of coffee and two million teas served every single day of the year.
Japan, though, is the nation of the vending machine, with five million or one for every twenty-three citizens. The range of goods dispensed by their machines includes fresh eggs, crepes, batteries, umbrellas, floral arrangements, edible insects, snails-in-a-can, and, recently, to the consternation of animal rights activists, whale and bear meat. In Germany, vending machines offer up to four varieties of sausage and accompanying side dishes, all that is needed to satisfy a wurst craving whenever it strikes.
The trend for imaginative uses of vending machines is reaching these shores. Penguin Books recently installed a book vending machine on Exeter St Davids train station, an innovation that has proven so successful that they held a public consultation to determine where to instal the next one. It is a reprise of an idea prototyped by their founder Allen Lane who attempted to increase the availability of his paperback books by installing the Penguincubator, a vending machine, outside a bookshop at 66, Charing Cross Road in 1937.
It was an apt choice of venue for stirring up the book trade. Previously known as the Bomb Shop, what had been the only socialist bookshop in the West End and a place of refuge for anarchists was a building “timorous women would hurry by, nervously fearful lest something would go off with a bang”, a contemporary source noted. Whether its notoriety thwarted the the Penguincubator’s enduring success is unclear.
The first documented vending machine was created back in the first century AD by Heron of Alexandria. Not content with giving us the windmill, the fire engine, the water fountain, and the syringe, frustrated by how much holy water individual worshippers were helping themselves to in the temples of Alexandria, he devised an automatic dispenser.
The worshipper would put a coin into a slot on the top of the machine which fell onto a metal lever, operating like a balance beam. At the other end of the beam was a piece of string attached to a plug that stopped a container filled with the holy water. The weight of the coin caused the beam to tilt, lifting the plug and dispensing liquid until the coin fell off the beam, at which point the plug would be replaced. This ingenious device ensured that everyone received their fair share of the water.
