Vending Machines – A History
Although Heron of Alexandria developed the first vending machine over two millennia ago, the idea was slow to take off. One of the earliest “modern” forms was the honour box, a feature of English taverns from the 17th until at least the 19th century. A form of portable tobacco dispenser made of brass, and designed to be passed around, it had a slot to take a penny coin and a plunger which, once the coin had dropped, opened a tobacco compartment. Unlike Heron’s water dispenser the machine did not release a precise quantity of tobacco, instead relying on the customer’s honour to take only a pipeful and shut the container door before passing it on to the next smoker.
A six-year prison sentence for distributing seditious and blasphemous material, such as Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794), led bookseller, Richard Carlile, to consider how he could automate the sale of such books. His solution, developed in 1822, was a self-service machine which allowed the purchaser to turn a dial to select the publication they wanted, deposit their money, and the book or journal would drop down in front of them. Whether this was an automated process is unclear, but notwithstanding Carlile’s ingenuity, his wife and employees were still harassed and prosecuted by the authorities.
In 1867 Simeon Denham from Wakefield was granted a patent (No 706) for a “Self-Acting Machine for the Delivery of Postage Receipt Stamps”, the first fully automatic selling device. Once a penny had been inserted into the slot, the machine would cut a postage stamp from a strip held inside and shoot it out to the waiting customer. This rather crude device seems to have promised more than it delivered and was quickly forgotten.
It took another twenty years for automatic vending machines to come into their own, Percival Everitt patenting the first commercially successful one, a postcard dispenser, in 1883. Once the design had been improved two years later, Everitt’s machine soon became a common feature in railway stations and post offices, offering envelopes, notepaper, and stamps for a coin of the realm. Such was the demand for vending machines that the first company specifically to deal with their installation and maintenance, the Sweetmeat Automatic Delivery Company, was formed in England in 1887.
Around the same time the Railway Automatic Electric Light Syndicate Ltd, founded by Dixon Davies and John Tourtel, patented a coin-operated reading lamp for use on trains. Drawing power from batteries, it offered a traveller thirty minutes of light for a penny. Neither it nor Tourtel’s coin-operated gas meter were a commercial success.
Packaged comestibles began to be dispensed from vending machines in the 1890s, the German chocolate manufacturer, Stollwerck, selling its wares from around 15,000 machines by 1893. They extended their range of goods to include cigarettes, matches, chewing gum, and soap products.
Over in America, Minneapolitan W H Fruen patented his “Automatic Drawing (of liquids) Device in 1884 which dispensed liquid in a manner remarkably like that deployed by Heron almost two millennia earlier. It did not prove a success and America had to wait another four years before the Thomas Adams Gum Company developed the country’s first practical vending machine, selling their Tutti-Frutti chewing gum, sited on a New York subway station platform. After a slow start, they have never looked back.
The practicalities associated with storing and delivering products has naturally limited what vending machines can offer, but within those constraints human ingenuity has triumphed. In the late 19th century, a vending machine in Corinne, Utah, offered legal divorce papers for $2.50 while for the same amount travellers at American airports could buy a life insurance policy covering a one-way trip well into the 1960s.
I wonder what Heron would have made of it all.
