Galton demonstrated this idea with a gadget he called the Quincunx to the Royal Society around 1874.33 The Quincunx looked a lot like an up-ended pinball machine. It had a narrow neck like an hour-glass, with about twenty pins stuck into the neck area. At the bottom, where the Quincunx was at its widest, was a row of little compartments. When shot were dropped through the neck, they hit the pins at random and tended to distribute themselves among the compartments in classic Gaussian fashion—most of them piled up in the middle, with smaller numbers on either side, and so on in diminishing
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