S1E4: Gottlieb — The Gold Standard

There is a particular kind of pinball machine that collectors will tell you represents the purest expression of the form. Warm incandescent light. Hand-painted backglass art. The sound of actual bells. Score reels that click through digits with satisfying mechanical weight. And somewhere on the cabinet, almost certainly, a small oval logo: D. Gottlieb and Co., Chicago, Illinois.Episode 4 is the story of the most important company in the history of pinball. We meet David Gottlieb — the Lithuanian immigrant who built it all — and the designers and artists who made his machines into objects people still restore, collect, and obsess over seventy years later. Wayne Neyens. Ed Krynski. Artist Roy Parker. And the golden age they created together in the 1950s and 60s that set the template every manufacturer since has had to reckon with.