Beam-Lite

Beam-Lite, released by Chicago Coin Machine Manufacturing Company on March 28, 1935, was one of the company's great early hits: with a confirmed production run of 5,703 units, it would become the second most successful game in Chicago Coin history. Designed by Sam Gensburg, this flipperless, battery-powered pin game (it used 8 batteries) shows the ingenuity that mid-1930s manufacturers poured into a fiercely competitive market.

The playfield carries 21 trap holes and a single kicker, and the game has no outhole in the conventional sense: any ball that reaches the very bottom of the playfield is kicked upwards into an enclosed scoring area rather than draining. The result is a lively, self-contained action loop that squeezed extra excitement from ten balls of play.

The game's name points to its most memorable feature. According to the Encyclopedia of Pinball Vol. 2, Gensburg dressed the game's light bulbs in colored covers, an idea he borrowed from Great States Mfg. Co.'s 1932 Flash Ball. His competitors, whose games all used naked clear-glass bulbs, never discovered his secret: the covers were simple colored pharmaceutical gel capsules cut in half. That splash of color helped make Beam-Lite stand out on location, and it remains a delightful piece of trivia for collectors today.