The Silver Spring Penguin

THE DISTRICT — (UPDATE) The domed courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum is usually a quiet, contemplative place, a welcome respite from the traffic-choked clamor that is Chinatown.

But on one rainy Saturday in late October, the place was a racket. Tin bells and electronic beeps bounced off the gray granite floors. Muted thumps offered a syncopated rhythm for excited “oohs” and disappointed “awws”.

Photo: This kid had never played pinball before, yet it took her only 15 minutes to dominate the game. Credit: J. Deseo/SSP.

The unusual noise sprang from an unusual source: an exhibit of pinball machines trucked in from Silver Spring’s National Pinball Museum. Some of the dozen machines on display were wooden games of chance (there were no flippers to knock balls back into the field of play) dating to the early 20th century, while a few more dated to the mid 1990s and incorporated electronic sound effects and animated displays.

All of them were available to museum visitors for play. No quarter (or nickel, in the case of older machines) necessary.

And the machines got some serious play. Little kids, some of whom didn’t get the concept, gravitated towards a “Stargate”-themed machine that played dialog from the 1994 sci-fi movie each time the silver ball hit a particular bumper. It took the kids about 20 minutes to dominate the game.

A few feet away, middle-aged dudes were giving hell to a machine inspired by rock guitarist Ted Nugent. The machine’s backboard prominently featured Nugent’s Motor City Madman look, heavy on the long hair and tight white pants. However, the machine wasn’t nearly as animated as its namesake, and was limited to the simple lights and bells available when it was manufactured in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, hipsters were hogging wooden machines from the 1920s and 1930s that were nothing more that games of dumb luck. On one machine, the pinballs would be propelled onto a tic-tac-toe board; three balls in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row meant a win. But there were no flippers or bumpers to keep balls in play — they either landed in a hole on the tic-tac-toe board, or they rolled into the drain.

Video: Pinball before the flippers. Yay? Credit: R. Pace/SSP

Flippers didn’t even come into the picture until 1947, David Silverman, the pinball museum’s curator, explained during a presentation at the Smithsonian. And the flippers that did make it into the game had a pivot opposite to what’s seen in later machines, he said. Instead of hinging on the flipper’s back end (so that a player can swat the pinball away from the drain), early flippers hinged towards the front end, which seemingly drove the ball into the drain.

Bells weren’t always part of the pinball scene either, Silverman said. In 1933, a salesman for game manufacturer Williams Electronics added a door bell to one pinball machine as a prank on a shop owner — each time the bell would ring during play, the shop owner would mistake it for a customer at the door. But the joke was on the salesman: The bell-ringing machine made three times more money than its silent counterpart.

Silverman has more than 800 machines at his pinball museum, a converted garage in his Colesville home. According to the museum’s website, the goal is to create a larger gallery space, as well as to offer traveling exhibits.

Click here to view more photos from the pinball museum’s appearance at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The machines on display at the Smithsonian have returned to Maryland, but visitors can check out “Punball: Only One Earth” at the American Art Museum’s third floor on Thursday, Dec 3, 2009. The National Pinball Museum can be toured by appointment.

Photography by Ron Pace for The Penguin.

Updated Nov 24, 2009, to include photos and video. — JD