Clipper

The Clipper is a single-player electro-mechanical game produced by the Stoner Manufacturing Company of Aurora, Illinois in November 1939. Stoner was one of the many midwestern makers active during pinball's pre-war boom, operating from 1933 until 1941, and Clipper comes from the later years of the company's run.

Little documentation survives about the Clipper's specific playfield design, theme, or features. As a late-1930s electro-mechanical game, it would have relied on the scoring bumpers and electric features typical of the pre-flipper era, but details beyond its maker, date, and single-player format are not recorded.

For collectors and historians, games like the Clipper are valuable precisely because so little is known about them: each surviving example or piece of period advertising helps fill in the picture of a prolific but short-lived manufacturer from pinball's formative years.