In the 1940s New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia smashed pinball machines with a sledgehammer and had the wreckage dumped in the river, part of a ban that lasted until 1976. This episode traces how the game got there, from French tabletop billiards under Louis XIV and the spring-plunger Billard Japonais, to Montague Redgrave's 1871 patent that shrank bagatelle onto a bar counter, to David Gottlieb's Baffle Ball and Raymond Maloney's Ballyhoo in the Depression, and Harry Williams adding the first solenoid in 1933.

Flippers did not arrive until Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty in 1947, and the modern two-flipper layout only settled in 1950. By then the association with bingo machines and cash payouts had cemented pinball's status as a gambling device in cities across America. The turning point came in 1976 when Roger Sharpe called his shot in front of  ...