Clown-N-Up

The Northwestern Mail Box Company's "Clown-N-Up," manufactured in 1933, is an early pure mechanical pinball machine from the industry's formative years, arriving not long after games like "Ballyhoo" (1931) helped spark the pinball craze of the early 1930s.

As a Pure Mechanical (PM) game, Clown-N-Up relied entirely on mechanical action rather than electricity — there were no flippers (which wouldn't be invented until 1947) or electromagnets involved. Instead, gameplay likely centered on a plunger-launched ball navigating a field of pins, bumpers, and scoring pockets, in the tradition of early bagatelle-derived pinball games of the period.

The machine's playfield design was protected under U.S. Patent #1,925,018, filed in September 1932 and granted to Sidney Weiss in August 1933. Beyond this patent record, little else is documented about Clown-N-Up's art, theme, or original designer, leaving it as a scarcely-documented but historically notable artifact from pinball's earliest mechanical era.