Word: slots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...history of Nevada, the only state in the U.S. where gambling is legal in nearly all its forms (prohibited: dog racing, jai alai), an organized band had figured out a way to fulfill the fondest dream of hundreds of thousands of lemon-loathing laymen: hitting the jackpot on the slot machine, otherwise known as the one-armed bandit...
Bandit-beating is not the simple business it once was. In the early days of the slots, the process was called "spooning," and it had nothing whatever to do with June or moon. A spooner would simply slip the handle of a tablespoon into the coin-return opening, wedge open the little trap door, insert his coin in the slot, and pull the lever. Down through the trap door would fall the take. One imaginative cheater was caught using a fine homemade machine tool with detachable heads, one each for nickel, dime, quarter, half-dollar and dollar slots...
Cheating the modern slots is therefore no job for the amateur. It requires professional skills: the crust of the con man, the deftness of the dip, the skill of the safecracker. The professional cheater will buy a machine ($400 and up), take it home to his workshop for devoted scientific study. Disassembling it, he will examine each reel, spring and screw. How best to make his entry? What tool will do the job? What part of the mechanism should be jimmied with what tool? Then comes careful experimentation until at last he discovers the machine's weak spot...
...customers have proved willing to pay $200 to $1,000, which Tinguely asks for his moving abstractions. But Tinguely has a new gadget, which harnesses one of his machines to a crayon or pen. When a slug is dropped in the slot, the machine traces circles, ellipses and swirls on a piece of paper. A friend is manufacturing the slugs, each marked "Good for One Tinguely." At his next exhibition, visitors will be invited to buy the slugs at perhaps 500 francs apiece. For a mere 5,000 francs more, Tinguely will consent to sign the result...
...service days completed in January '58, Sigmund returned to Cambridge, a tutorial slot at Winthrop House, and a temporary end to travels. He spend the year writing his thesis ("with just a short break for a trip to India"), again assisted in Gov 1 and Gov 106, and this spring was named head tutor in Riesman's Soc Sci 136. And now, along with Master Bullitt, tutors named and unnamed, eighty hand-picked sophomores and juniors and many many uninterviewed freshman, he stands on the threshold of Quincy. Let's hope the threshold holds...