A partial history of the coin-op fortune teller
For thirty years, the American arcade sold prophecy for a penny. Most of the machines are gone. The ones that survived have earned their aura the hard way.
The classical form is this: a wooden cabinet about the height of a bar stool, a glass case containing a wax or papier-mâché figure — usually a turbaned woman, sometimes a bearded sage — a slot for a penny or nickel, and a small tray for the printed card that emerges once the mechanism has done its work. The figure gestures, sometimes nods, and a card appears bearing a fortune written in the confident register of the 1910s. "You will travel by water within the year." "Do not trust the friend with red hair." "A small windfall awaits you before the leaves change."
They were everywhere, once. Then they were not.
The makers
The Mills Novelty Company of Chicago was the largest single manufacturer, though not the first. Their Wizard Fortune Teller, introduced around 1907, set the visual template that everyone else more or less copied: full-figure automaton, glass cabinet, brass fittings, printed card delivered through a slot at knee height. Mills also made slot machines, jukeboxes, and mechanical scales, and the fortune tellers ran on the same industrial logic — die-cast parts, oak cabinets, straightforward maintenance.
Roovers Brothers of Brooklyn came at it from the other direction. They were figure-makers first, having supplied wax and composition heads to the dime museums of Coney Island since the 1890s. Their fortune tellers — the Grandma Predictions machine most famously, though that particular one arrived later — have a handmade quality that the Mills machines do not. Roovers heads have real hair, glass eyes with hand-painted irises, and expressions that are, frankly, disquieting.
Between them, Mills and Roovers accounted for most of the market. There were smaller makers: Caille Brothers in Detroit, the Exhibit Supply Company in Chicago, Watling Manufacturing, and a handful of regional operators whose output rarely traveled far from where it was built.
The golden age
From roughly 1905 through the early 1930s, coin-operated amusement was a legitimate American industry with its own trade press, its own conventions, and its own aesthetics. Penny arcades occupied prime real estate in every major city — Times Square, Market Street in San Francisco, Boardwalk arcades in Atlantic City and Coney Island — and a working fortune teller was as much a part of that landscape as a nickelodeon or a strength tester.
The Depression thinned the herd. Gambling laws thinned it further; several states classified coin-operated fortune tellers as games of chance and required their removal. The arrival of pinball in the mid-1930s changed the economics of arcade floor space: pinball earned more per square foot, drew younger customers, and did not require the maintenance of a wax figure in a glass case.
By 1945, most of the machines had been broken up for parts, sold for scrap, or shoved into the back rooms of arcades where they slowly disintegrated in the sea air.
What happened to the survivors
The estimate we work from — and it is only an estimate — is that of perhaps forty thousand coin-operated fortune tellers manufactured in North America between 1900 and 1935, fewer than four hundred survive in original condition. Another few hundred exist in some restored or partially restored state. The rest are gone.
The reasons are mundane. Water damage in beachfront arcades. Fires. Well-meaning owners who repainted the figures, replaced the mechanisms with electric motors, or simply threw out the "creepy old head" because it frightened the grandchildren. The 1970s were particularly hard on them; a wave of arcade closures put hundreds of machines into estate sales and general junk auctions at a moment when nobody was collecting them.
An intact 1912 Mills Wizard with its original figure, original card mechanism, and original cabinet finish is now, in effect, a museum object. You cannot buy one at any reasonable price because nobody sensible is selling.
Why they hit the way they do
There is a temptation to be arch about coin-operated prophecy — to treat the machines as camp, to smirk at the fortunes. This misreads the object. A working fortune teller from 1915 is a piece of industrial folk art built at a moment when Americans were negotiating, in public, with the idea of chance itself. The card you take away is trivial. The act of putting the penny in is not.
Anyone who has watched a well-restored Grandma Predictions machine deliver a card to a stranger at a boardwalk arcade in Asbury Park will tell you that people still lean in. They still read the card twice. They still fold it into a wallet.
A closing note
We have a small standing interest in coin-operated automata — Mills, Roovers, and the smaller makers — and we occasionally have one or two in the workroom in various states of restoration. If you keep an eye on the catalog, or if you write to us about a specific machine, we will tell you honestly what we know and, more often, what we do not.