Whiffle

Whiffle, manufactured by Yohio Manufacturing Company of Youngstown, Ohio in March 1931, is part of the earliest lineage of coin-operated pin games, descending from Arthur L. Paulin's 1930 home-built prototype and its 1931 commercial follow-up, Old Jenny (Whiffle). Pinball itself traces further back to 19th-century bagatelle games, and Whiffle represents an early step in coin-operated pin-game development.

Whiffle is a Pure Mechanical (PM), single-player machine, predating flippers (introduced in 1947) and any electronic components. Little specific information is available regarding its features and rules, but like its Whiffle-lineage siblings it likely used plunger shots and gravity-driven mechanisms to route the ball toward scoring holes, with the player tallying results by hand.

Given the scarcity of information surrounding this particular Whiffle model and Yohio Manufacturing's brief existence, it remains a valuable subject for collectors and historians studying the formative years of pinball's development.