A short history of the vending machine

Posted by Groshan Fabiola
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Vending machines are machines used to dispense products such as snacks, cigarettes, beverages, lottery tickets, alcohol and cologne automatically in exchange for currency and credit. The customer is required to insert coins or credit into the machine and choose the item he/she wishes to purchase and the machine will provide. Even though it seems like a late invention, the earliest reference to this type of useful device is made in the first century. Among the works of the Hero of Alexandria, a renowned engineer and mathematician, is counted an ingenious machine that could disperse holy water after the user inserted a coin in the machine. The coin would fall on a pan, in turn attached to a lever that opened a valve to the holy water which started to flow out. The pan would ten tilt because of the weight of the coin and the water would continue to flow until the coin fell off and the lever was snapped back and the valve was turned off. The simple, yet ingenious mechanism is nothing compared to the modern New Jersey vending machines, but the idea was copied later on by tobacco manufacturers. Coin operated vending machines could be seen in the taverns of seventeen century England dispersing tobacco. These were brass made and easy to carry around. The very first fully automatic vending machine was created by Simeon Denham in 1867. His machine dispersed stamps automatically, but the mechanism was still far from the vending machines New Jersey we are used to see nowadays.


Modern coin-operated vending machines dispensing envelopes, post cards, and notepaper were introduced in the1880s in London. Invented by Percival Everitt the machine became very popular and was found at every railway station and post office in the city. The Sweetmeat Automatic Delivery Company was the first English company that specialized in installing and maintaining vending machines. Vending machines were introduced in the US at the end of the eighteen century and it was used to disperse gum on New York City train platforms. The manufacturer of the machines, Thomas Adams Gum Company, also added interesting small figures into the mechanism, which would move whenever someone bought a gum, making the vending machines more fun. The New Jersey vending machines used for snacks and beverages were next.



The vending machine has gone through important transformations from its inception. From the simple lever mechanism that dispersed holy water to the powerful machines that accept credit cards and disperse anything including gold and precious stones was a long way. The evolution of the vending machine has known a lot of ups and downs and at the moment we use different types of mechanisms, depending on our needs. For instance, there are vending machines that use claw cranes while others are designed to stack products on a countertop. The recent innovations brought to vending machines include standardization of coin and currency acceptance, improved money validation and the introduction of the sense and feedback systems that can verify whether the product was delivered.



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