Golden Horseshoe

The Golden Horseshoe, produced by Artistic Novelty Works of Chicago in August 1932, is an example of the pure mechanical pin games that launched the pinball craze in the early 1930s. Games of this era had no electrical components at all: a player propelled balls onto a pin-studded playfield with a plunger and watched them settle into scoring holes, with no flippers - which would not be invented for another fifteen years - and no powered features of any kind.

Very little documentation about the Golden Horseshoe survives beyond its production details. Its maker, Artistic Novelty Works, appears to have operated only in 1932, one of the many small Chicago shops that sprang up during the countertop pin-game boom and quickly vanished as larger manufacturers came to dominate the business.

For collectors and historians, machines like the Golden Horseshoe are appealing precisely because they capture pinball at its very beginning, before electricity, sound, or flippers - a simple game of gravity and chance that nonetheless proved irresistible to Depression-era players.