I was watching the History channel about vending machines and the said that in the early days of these machines people would drill a hole in a quarter and tie something to it, insert it in the vending machine get the credit and then pull out the quarter for a free game. Well the machine makers wised up to this and then installed cutters inside to cut the line when the person tries to pull the quarter back. I thought that was interesting and I wanted to post it for this forum. Anyone recall ever seeing a quarter with a hole in it?
phonebooths? 10 cent calls.. Man you guys are like really old!. LOL... Yes I have heard the same as Treas on the phones.. did it work? I dunno.. Guess I never had the inkling to try it.. Never heard that about vending machines though..
Later on the machine makers just put in a mechanism to separate the coin from the channel making it impossible to pull back out, making a string cutter obsolete. Its pretty simple, you just move the coin sideways and separate it from the main track. I read a book on coin acceptance mechanisms when I was younger. Any coin with a hole could have been used this way, since there were vending machines in most denominations. However, you will never know if this was the reason since people put holes in coins for as long as there have been coins, mainly to wear around their neck. My friend metal detected, and showed me his latest find one day in the 80's. It was a really nice XF S-VDB, with an attempted hole at 12 o'clock. Made both of us sad.....
I understand that instead of string, the crooks started using stranded wire fishing leaders to tie to the coins. I have even seen 5c pieces with this rig that were used on Army bases to get Cokes from the old vending machines, so I heard. lol
as long as there have been machines that accepted coins there have been people trying to beat them by getting what they want for free, it is still happening today in our world of electronic and computer controlled machines, only now you just have to fiqure out the correct codes for the correct machines. go to you tube and watch some of the crazy ways folks come up with to get free stuff!
It used to be very common back in the early days of the arcade video games. You couldn't pull the quarter back out as medamoraman mentioned, but by controlling the decent of the quarter until it reached the leaf switch that counted the coin and gave you the credit , you could stop the quarter at that point and bounce the coin up and down on the switch and add on tens or even a hundred credits or more before the string broke and the quarter dropped on down into the cashbox. You could tie up a machine all day play as much as you wanted, get in a lot of practice, let all your friends play for free, and do it all on a single quarter.
That's where Clark Kent changed into Superman. (I wonder where he is changing in the age of cell phones.)
When I was in grammar school, guys use to put napkins up the return slot of the pay phones and collect the returns after school. That why the phone companies changed the return slots with a different cover. Oh, well. -O)
