1949 Williams FRESHIE pinball machine

Here's a 1949 Williams Freshie pinball machine in action. This is one of the older machines I've featured on the channel. In fact, it might be the oldest to date.

Williams machines of this era (until 1954, I believe) used "impulse flippers", which flip both flippers simultaneously regardless of which button the player presses. Additionally, there was no ability to "hold" the flippers in the engaged position, which means that the player could only flail haphazardly at the ball and hope that he/she could manage to get the ball where they wanted it to go. It was a definite un-fun design compared to Gottlieb and the other manufacturers of the time and it's obvious why it was changed by the mid-50's.

This goal of this game was to spot the numbers 1 through 6 which then lit the centre hole for the "super special", which would award 5 free games. Freshie was pretty innovative for its time because it has a stepper that tracks how many games have been played since the last super special was awarded. The side lane specials and outlane specials will light depending on how many games have been played since the last super special was achieved. Additionally, since the ball has to travel through the outlanes to be lost, the game also has a ball count stepper and will light certain features on the fourth and fifth ball. Again, this was was pretty innovative for its time.

Steve Young at the Pinball Resource told me that the fence depicted on the backglass contains the initials of Harry Williams and his wife, Sam Stern and his wife and the Williams Cheif Engineer at the time and his wife. These are hard to see in photos. I tried to show this in the video at the 2:46 mark.

Freshie was designed by the great Harry Williams and Sam Stern (yup!) and the artwork was done by George Molentin.