See the holes on the disc in the center of the wheel? Well, what happens is that there’s a hole for each color, and when the wheel stops a plunger pokes its way through one of the holes with the appropriate color paying off provided You played it. But the Caille creation is a lot spiffier. The DETROIT and the NEW CENTURY DETROIT are akin to the Mills ON-THE-SQUARE in that the stopping action can be seen from the players’ side. Rarity has a lot to do with this, as there are far fewer NEW CENTURY DETROIT machines around then DEWEYS and NEW CENTURY PUCKS among others. The Caille NEW CENTURY DETROIT is one of the classiest machines you can own, and for that reason it tends to be worth more than a lot of equally good looking machines. The amazing fact is that they were selling the old and newer models at the same time, and you’ll find all four the DETROIT and NEW CENTURY DETROIT, both in “plain” and “music” models in the Caille Bros. The richly decorated NEW CENTURY DETROIT was a lot better looking than the old slab cabinet Caille-Schiemer and later Caille Bros. They’d get killed if they put “20th Century” on an upgrade, so they picked another pop expression of the day for their remakes of 1901, batting out “New Century” machines. You could make a new machine or a new model of an old machine and call it the “20th Century Something.” Mills copped the name fast for their brand new TWENTIETH CENTURY floor machine, so Caille Bros.

Well, their things do but their basic thinking doesn’t. In our own day, there’s the “Mark II” anything, and the beginning usage of expressions about “21st Century Technology.” We’ve come full circle, proving that people never really seem to change. Witness the Bally DRAW BELL and the later DELUXE DRAW BELL. Post-war Bally and Keeney slot machines added words in much the same way. Evidenced are the old World War II Boeing FLYING FORTRESS and SUPERFORTRESS bombers. Back in the forties and fifties we used to add the word “super” to everything to mean a later, improved or larger model.

It was as easy to proliferate models way back when as it is today.

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