Although in theory the alloy of the nickel coin is the same, in practice there is certainly a difference in hardness between early coins and modern ones. If you pull a 40 year-old nickel out of pocket change, which is easy to find, it's still thick. When I pulled 40 year-old Buffalo nickels out of pocket change in the 60s they were usually so worn that there was hardly any detail left. In looking at lots of old coins over the years (I was a coin collector once upon a time) pre-Jefferson nickels are almost always found in extremely worn condition. This is not something new. I have a 1936 slot machine on which the original payout card indicates a range for each winning combination -- 4 to 6, 12 to 14 etc. This is because the payout tube is designed to release coins within a pre-determined height of those stacked in the tube. If it's filled with thick, new nickels a smaller number will fit in the same space. The same height of well-worn nickels will have one or two extra coins. The early coin-ops were pretty unsophisticated. Anything with weight could release the start mechanism, which is why slugs were such a problem. Some could easily be tripped by a coin attached to a wire -- insert the coin, trip the mech, and pull the coin back out. Some very clever, if crude, mechanisms were designed to prevent fraud. If you look at the 'Manhattan' at the end of the video you'll see the coin rolls down a ramp and jumps through the air, landing in a cup that then directs it down to trip the mechanism. That air gap was a slug rejector; there's a small magnet at the base of the ramp that will deflect a steel slug and cause it to drop short. Only a penny has the right overall weight to cross the gap and fall in the cup. The ramp itself as an open back, with a wire along the top. It also slants slightly. Any undersize slug would fall right through the open back. On my Berliner coin-op the coin entry has a levered piece inside that closes the slot before opening the bottom to let the coin drop. This prevents the wire trick -- if the slot can't close up because there's a wire in it, the bottom won't open enough for the coin to pass through to the trip lever. There's also a spring-loaded rod to keep the turntable from being rotated backwards to wind up the machine. Crude stuff but remarkably ingenious for the time. All that said, I use period coins with all my machines simply because it seems most appropriate. A Lincoln penny will run the Manhattan with no problem but somehow it just seems wrong.... I'm extremely detail-oriented! Regarding the video itself, this aired on the local NBC affiliate channel in San Francisco on 9/6/01. The reporter does technology reports, this was a bit of a digression to look at some old technology instead of her usual focus on computers. They spent about four hours filming and cut it down to the 2 minutes you see on screen. They did a good job overall, despite the egregious errors as noted by Andy Baron. But I've had far worse reporters. I wince at some of the ways I've been misquoted or misunderstood over the years. It goes all the way back to the 1963 newspaper article on my site. I've had enough experience with the press in my business life to not worry about it anymore. I just assume they'll get things wrong, and hope they at least get the important points right! (I have stories I could tell........)
Best regards, Rene Rondeau
