Exhibit Supply Company

Exhibit Supply Company (ESCO) was a Chicago coin-machine manufacturer that began in 1901 as a printer of penny-arcade "exhibit cards" — photo cards of ballplayers, boxers and movie stars sold through its own vending machines — under J. Frank Meyer, who joined the firm in 1907 and controlled it by 1910. Exhibit added pinball to its arcade line in the mid-1930s: Drop Kick (1934), the payout baseball game Play Ball (1935), whose playfield lights tracked runners around the bases, and Trapper (1936), whose spring-loaded mechanical traps dropped animal-shaped targets when struck. Lightning (1938) ran seven electromagnets beneath the playfield, the work of Harry Williams and Lyn Durant — two ex-Bally engineers who left in 1942 to start companies of their own.

World War II shifted Exhibit to military switch production through its Electro-Snap division, a business that came to outlast its games. Postwar flipper machines like Samba, Circus and Electric Hockey followed, but after the deaths of Meyer and two senior executives in 1948 and mounting competition from Bally, Gottlieb and Williams, amusement-machine production ended in 1957. The switch business carried the company to a 1979 sale to trading-card dealer Paul Marchant, who dissolved it in 1985.