The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-10-21

fact that 1t Is not considered good foRm to eat candy at the play.
 There is one set of people that has not worked very hard toward getting a. "beat- er-proof" slot machine That is the tele- phone people. In many big cities one may see windows with little pieces in them of the sizes of niclkels, dimes and quarters, and with them are advertisements read ing: ''relephone slugs, $1O a thousand" These will work in thes telephone slots all right. And yet the telephone companies make no effort to run them down. The people in whose places of business a tele- phone is located have to pay face value for every message. If there are a dozen slugs in a telephone, the man fin whose office it is located must make them good. The result is that the telephone company has not lost anything by the transaction. In fact, the slug habit began with the telephone companies themselves. It origi- hated in San Francisco, the slugs there having the stamp of the telephone com panies on them, and were not used to beat the telephone.
 The slot machine is profitable inven- tion. Every big railroad company uses it in various forms, and though such a cor poration handles business amounting to hundreds of millions, it scorns not the frugal penny that comes in through the weighing machine and the chewing gum vendor. IL has men to look after them, and carloads of pennies come in every week. The street railways have them in their amusement parks and find them to be source of no inconsiderable revenue. And the slot machine amusement parlors make pennies, nickels and dimes by the wagonloads.
 Some idea of the revenue of these amusement parlors may be gleaned by the mutoscope makers experience. When slot machines became of commercial im- portance about 12 years ago this com pany fitted out parlors in New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Baltimore, thinking to sell them. They put on such a. stiff price, however. that no one could be found who would buy a single one of them. So there was nothing left for the company to do but to operate tine places themselves, which they did. The result was that every establishment took in enough money the first year to pay the price they had asked, and the rent be- sides George Gould and Senator Depew were the principal packers of the com pany that put all the weighing machines into the railroad stations of the country. They made barrels of pennies, and are still making them. though there has been a tendency to retire the machines from modern railway stations.
 The quick lunch machines and the boot backing machines have never become popular on this side of the water though both have been tried. The automatic bootblacks made no allowance for corns and bunions, and on the whole failed to do the work up to the standard of the little shine artist of today. The quick lunch was given a tryout on F street, in Washington By depositing coin and moving a little lever one could get a piece of pie a sandwich of the kind de- sired. a cup of coffee, or anything else usually found at quick lunch counter.
 Accident insurance without an agent is to be one of the luxuries of the near fu- tre. A prominent accident insurance com pany has recently decided to use a pat ent slot machine for this work. A man who wants to insure himself for a day drops his quarter into the slot and the machine gives him duplicate tickets. The one is signed by the company and consti- tutes his policy. The other he signs and puts back into the machine. A third one has been retained by the machine itself. Each of the three tickets is automatically stamped with the day, hour and minute of issue. It is estimated that there are 1,545, ,439 ,527 pennies in the United States and that one-half of them go through slot machine every year, while some of them make 100 trips in that time.
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