40 Fun Facts About Vending Machines

Which soft-drink company asked the US Treasury in 1953 to mint a 7.5-cent coin for vending machines?

Coca-Cola was stuck at five cents because its machines took a single coin and could not give change. Doubling the price to a dime was too big a jump, and the Treasury turned the idea down.

Slot machine reels show fruit because early models had a vending attachment for which fruit-flavoured product?

Chewing gum of the Bell-Fruit brand was pictured on the reels too, as a single stick. The cherries, lemons, oranges and plums matched the flavours on offer.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, vending machines in American airports sold travellers which product before a flight?

Life insurance policies from the machines paid out if the buyer's plane crashed. They faded away as American courts kept interpreting the small print against the companies that sold them.

A vending machine installed in the lobby of Abu Dhabi's Emirates Palace hotel became famous for dispensing what?

Gold bars of 10 grams came out of a machine that was itself covered in gold leaf. Its prices followed the market, updated over an encrypted internet link.

Which online used-car retailer opened a coin-operated 'car vending machine' tower in Nashville in 2015?

Carvana gives buyers a commemorative coin to set the fully automated tower going. Its first car vending machine had opened in Atlanta in 2013.

After dozens of deaths, labels added to American soda vending machines in 1995 warned customers never to do what?

Rock or tilt them and a machine could topple: regulators counted at least 37 deaths among people shaking machines for free drinks or money. Seven makers agreed to add the labels.

Which American realist painted Automat in 1927, showing a lone woman with coffee inside a coin-operated restaurant?

Edward Hopper used his wife Jo as the model but altered her face to make her look younger. The picture now belongs to the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa.

Which engineer of Roman Egypt described the earliest known vending machine, a coin-operated dispenser of holy water?

Hero of Alexandria's device worked by weight: the coin landed on a pan that pulled a valve open, then slid off so a counterweight shut the flow again.

The Thomas Adams company built America's first vending machines in 1888 for the train platforms of which city?

New York commuters were the first Americans to buy from a machine. In 1897 a rival firm added little figures that moved with every purchase, to tempt more buyers.

By 1893 the German firm Stollwerck was selling which product through 15,000 of its own vending machines?

Chocolate was only the start: Stollwerck set up companies abroad to build machines that also sold matches and soap. Ludwig Stollwerck had introduced the firm's first machines in 1887.

The first modern coin-operated vending machines, introduced in London in the early 1880s, dispensed what?

Postcards were soon joined by envelopes and notepaper in Percival Everitt's machines, which became a common sight at railway stations and post offices after 1883.

Simon Denham's 1867 British patent, regarded as the first fully automatic vending machine, dispensed which small item?

Postage stamps proved ideal for machines. Britain's first production models followed in 1907, after experiments with a design patented by the New Zealander Robert Dickie.

Art-o-mat machines, which dispense small pieces of art, are repurposed vending machines that once sold what?

Cigarettes came in packs of a handy size, so every artwork is made to match. Clark Whittington installed the first Art-o-mat in 1997, selling pictures for a dollar each.

Which vending machines are nicknamed 'honor boxes' because one payment opens the door to the whole stack?

Newspaper racks trust each buyer to take a single copy, since the door gives access to the lot. George Hemmeter invented the coin-operated version in 1947.

Sega's UFO Catcher, a 1985 arcade hit whose name became a byword for the whole genre, is what kind of machine?

Claw crane ancestors go back to the Erie Digger of 1926, a coin-operated toy steam shovel that scooped up candy. Sega's version later filled entire arcade floors.

What do shoppers feed into a 'reverse vending machine' to get a refund or a reward in return?

Empty bottles are scanned by barcode so the machine knows what it has been given before it pays out. The idea was first patented in America in 1920, with a coin return as the reward.

In a typical snack vending machine, which part rotates to release the chosen item so that it drops?

A metal coil holds a row of snacks and turns just far enough to free the one at the front. Newer automated kiosks sometimes fetch the product with a robotic arm instead.

Sprinkles, a bakery chain from Beverly Hills, ran 24-hour vending machines nicknamed 'ATMs' that sold what?

Cupcakes were on sale around the clock from 25 of the machines by the time the chain closed. Sprinkles had opened its first shop in 2005.

Quisisana, the first automat restaurant serving its food through vending machines, opened in 1895 in which city?

Berlin was also home to Max Sielaff's factory, which shipped patented food machines to dozens of restaurants, including the first automat outside Europe.

Horn & Hardart opened the first automat in the United States in 1902 on Chestnut Street in which city?

Philadelphia diners fed coins into slots beside small glass doors to reach buns, beans, fish cakes and coffee. The chain became the world's largest, with over 100 restaurants.

FEBO, a fast-food chain that sells krokets and other hot snacks from automats, comes from which country?

Netherlands snack fans know FEBO for the krokets and frikandellen in its automats. The chain began in Amsterdam in 1941 and is named after a street, Ferdinand Bolstraat.

In which Asian city did a dealership open a 15-storey vending machine stocked with Ferraris and Lamborghinis in 2016?

Singapore dealer Autobahn Motors filled the tower with 60 luxury cars. America's first car vending machine had appeared three years earlier, in Atlanta.

Redbox, the DVD rental kiosk business, began as an expansion project inside which fast-food company?

McDonald's first used the kiosks to sell fresh dairy and other products around the clock. When that ended in 2003, an executive turned them over to DVD rentals, tested in Denver in 2004.

A vending machine developed in Italy in 2009 mixes flour and water, then bakes which food in about three minutes?

Pizza is made from scratch behind windows so the customer can watch, then cooked in an infrared oven. Entrepreneur Claudio Torghele invented the machine in Rovereto.

Which Bandai trademark for capsule toys imitates the sound of a crank turning and a capsule landing?

Gashapon joins 'gasha', the hand crank, to 'pon', the capsule dropping into the tray. Capsule toy machines were imported from America in 1965, and Bandai took them up in 1977.

Mold-A-Rama vending machines, a hit at the 1964 World's Fair, make which souvenir while the customer watches?

Plastic figurines of dinosaurs cost 25 cents at the fair's Sinclair Oil exhibit. The machines were built in Chicago, where they became a fixture of museums and Brookfield Zoo.

How does the Biblio-Mat, a vending machine in a Toronto bookshop, choose the old book each customer receives?

At random is the whole point: a microprocessor picks from three stacks, and an antique telephone bell rings as the book arrives. Jack White later ordered a similar machine for his London shop.

At which American university did computer scientists wire a soft-drink vending machine to the network in 1982?

Carnegie Mellon's machine could report its stock and how cold the drinks were, thanks to sensors fitted by graduate students. It is remembered as an early ancestor of the smart device.

Allen Lane, founder of which paperback publisher, set up a book vending machine on London's Charing Cross Road?

Penguin paperbacks were meant to be cheap enough to sell from a machine, and Lane's was dubbed the Penguincubator. It stood outside a shop called Henderson's.

Which brand was first called the 'Health Kup' and sold with Lawrence Luellen's one-cent water vending machine?

Dixie Cup took its later name from a line of dolls. Luellen worried about germs spread by shared drinking glasses, and his ice-cooled water vendors became standard on American trains.

What name is given to a fake coin, such as a washer, fed into a vending machine to cheat it?

Slug users often pass off a genuine coin from another country that is worth far less but matches the size and weight. Prosecutions are rare because each theft is so small.

Richard Carlile, an English bookseller, devised a dispensing machine in 1822 to distribute what kind of material?

Banned works were Carlile's speciality: his edition of Thomas Paine's long-prohibited The Age of Reason brought him a string of lawsuits in 1819.

A coin-operated device patented for English trains in the 1880s by John Tourtel sold 30 minutes of what for a penny?

Reading light came from a battery-powered lamp, but the scheme was not a lasting success. Tourtel also invented a coin-operated gas meter, a kind of device that spread to several countries.

Besides optical scanning, which property of the ink on many banknotes do vending machines test to spot a fake?

Its magnetism comes from iron particles in the ink: the note passes over a magnet and a sensor reads the field left behind. Some machines also measure how the paper glows under ultraviolet.

Around 1972, which university's AI lab ran a computer-controlled vending machine that sold on credit?

Stanford researchers adapted a rented machine so that it took cash or, through a Teletype terminal, put purchases on account. It served a room named the Prancing Pony.

TOMRA, a leading maker of reverse vending machines, was founded by the Planke brothers in 1972 in which country?

Norway's Tore and Petter Planke started the company, which became the biggest manufacturer of such machines and also builds sorting equipment for the food and mining industries.

Horn & Hardart, whose last automat closed in 1991, had by then turned most of its sites into which chain?

Burger King restaurants took over the old sites. At its peak the company had run forty automats in a single city, with Walter Winchell among its celebrity patrons.

Luxury vending machines that opened in three American malls in 2013 sold truffles, escargot and which delicacy?

Caviar from the machines ran from $30 an ounce to $500 an ounce for Imperial River Beluga. One marketing analyst said the idea was merely to generate buzz.

Portable brass coin-operated machines stood in English taverns as early as 1615, dispensing which product?

Tobacco machines like these came some 250 years before the first fully automatic vending machine, which was patented in 1867.

Giving Machines, set up each Christmas by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, let people buy what?

Charity gifts on offer range from a $2 box of macaroni and cheese to livestock. The first machine was unveiled in Salt Lake City in 2017, and the church pays the running costs.