D. Gottlieb & Co.

D. Gottlieb & Co. was founded in Chicago in 1927 by David Gottlieb, who initially made novelty items like the Husky Grip Tester before moving into pinball. The company's breakthrough came in 1931 with Baffle Ball, a mechanical countertop game co-designed with John Keeney that sold roughly 50,000 units at $17.50 apiece and helped launch the pinball industry during the Great Depression. Gottlieb couldn't keep up with demand, which pushed one of his distributors, Raymond Moloney, to found a rival company, Bally Manufacturing, around a competing game called Ballyhoo.

Gottlieb switched to electromechanical production in the mid-1930s and, in 1947, released Humpty Dumpty, the first pinball machine with player-controlled flippers. Designed by Harry Mabs with artwork by Roy Parker, the game used six outward-facing "flipper bumpers," and roughly 6,500 were built before the mechanism was adopted industry-wide as the new standard. Gottlieb spent the following decades as one of the era's leading manufacturers, known for "wedgehead" cabinets with flared, wider tops and for Parker's backglass artwork — he was the company's sole artist until 1965.

The Gottlieb family sold the company to Columbia Pictures in 1977. After Coca-Cola acquired Columbia, the pinball division was renamed Mylstar Electronics in 1983, and Coca-Cola shut it down the following year. A management buyout led by Gilbert Pollock and the Fesjian family formed Premier Technology in October 1984, which kept building Gottlieb-branded machines out of factories in Bensenville, Illinois, and West Fargo, North Dakota. Premier closed in the summer of 1996, with Barb Wire as its last release. Gottlieb Development LLC, based in Pelham Manor, New York, now holds the Gottlieb, D. Gottlieb & Co., and Premier trademarks.