1871 Redgrave Parlor Bagatelle

The 1871 Redgrave Parlor Bagatelle is a remarkable piece of pre-pinball history, predating the modern flipper pinball machine by more than three-quarters of a century. As one of the earliest known mechanical amusement devices in this lineage, it showcases the format's infancy, long before the term "pinball" itself came into use. It was produced by the M. Redgrave Bagatelle Company of Jersey City, New Jersey.

As a pure mechanical (PM) bagatelle, the game relies entirely on gravity and manual operation -- players launch a ball onto an inclined pin-studded playfield and let it settle into scoring pockets, with no electricity, flippers, or electromechanical components of any kind (those innovations were still decades away; flippers themselves would not appear in pinball until 1947).

Specific details about its playfield design, artwork, or scoring layout are not well documented today, but its age alone makes the 1871 Redgrave Parlor Bagatelle a treasured artifact for collectors and historians. As one of the earliest surviving examples of a coin- or token-free mechanical game of skill, it offers a rare window into the entertainment devices that predate and prefigure the pinball machine as we know it.