Originally, the pinball machine was a flipperless game that had to be jostled to direct the ball. It wasn’t a truly perfected contraption until it was tweaked by Steve Kordek in 1948. The inventor just passed away at 100. From his New York Times obituary:

“In 1947, two designers at the D. Gottlieb & Company pinball factory in Chicago, Harry Mabs and Wayne Neyens, transformed that rudimentary game into one called Humpty Dumpty, adding six electromechanical flippers, three on each side from the top to the bottom of the field.

It was an instant hit — until, at a trade show in Chicago 1948, Mr. Kordek introduced Triple Action, a game that featured just two flippers, both controlled by buttons at the bottom of the table. Mr. Kordek was a designer for Genco, one of more than two dozen pinball manufacturers in Chicago at the time.

Not only was Mr. Kordek’s two-flipper game less expensive to produce; it also gave players greater control. For someone concentrating on keeping a chrome-plated ball from dropping into the ‘drain,’ two flippers, one for each hand, were better than six.

‘It really was revolutionary, and pretty much everyone else followed suit,’ David Silverman, executive director of the National Pinball Museum in Baltimore, said in an interview. ‘And it’s stayed the standard for 60 years.'”

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Curly, tempestuous by nature, frustrated by a pre-Kordek machine in 1942: