Double-Shuffle (Junior)

The Double-Shuffle (Junior) is a pure mechanical countertop game manufactured by the Hercules Novelty Company of Chicago in September 1932. Remarkably for a game made fifteen years before the electric flipper, it features eight mechanical flippers, controlled by two levers with each lever operating four flippers simultaneously. The game has no plunger at all: a knob on the cabinet front raises the ball to the lowest flipper at the bottom of the playfield, and the player then works the levers to flip the ball upward toward the higher-scoring holes at the top. Play cost one or five cents.

The game's origin story is a good one. According to the Encyclopedia of Pinball, Charles Gravatt built the game himself and operated it in North Carolina for six months before Charles Chizewer, president of Hercules Novelty, spotted it while traveling and convinced Gravatt to patent it. The patent was granted in an unusually fast six weeks, and Gravatt licensed the mechanical flipper rights to Hercules, which produced the game as this Junior model and shortly afterward a Senior model. Hercules also made the game as a private label for the Ad-Lee Company.

Advertisements of the period listed the Junior model at 15 by 31 inches or 16 by 32 inches, depending on the ad, with a wood or steel stand sold separately. As an uphill, lever-flipped mechanical game from 1932, Double-Shuffle (Junior) stands as a fascinating precursor to ideas pinball would not fully embrace until the flipper era began in 1947.