Richard Carlile, English bookseller in 1822 designed a vending machine he hoped would keep the censors and the police at bay. He also a freethinker believed that by doing so the bookseller could not be legally identified.
In 1857, the first patent issued for a fully automatic selling device apparently went to Simeon Denham of Wakefield in Yorkshire, England. It was designed to sell a stamp for a penny.
The first vending machine in France were introduced in 1889 by the Society of the Store for Blind, dispensing chocolates and bonbon in railway station along the route from Paris to Marseilles.
The first success that established the industry in the United States was in 1888 when Thomas Adams Gum Company began installed machines at stations of the New York elevated trains to sell his ‘tutti frutti’ chewing gum. Product offerings expanded to bit after the turn of the century to candy, handfuls of peanuts, cigarettes and postage stamps.
Chocolate company Hershey’s introduced the first nickel candy bar in 1929 and within a few years, operating a hundred machines, each offering five different selections of nickel candy bars.
In 1901, F W and H S Mills debuted penny in the slot machines in Chicago. The following year Horn and Hardart Automat opened a restaurant in Philadelphia that sold food, such as sandwiches and coffee, solely from vending machines.
During the early 1920s, vending machines began dispensing soft drinks into cups. It got an even bigger boost in the 1950s with invention of coffee vending machines.
In 1965 soft drinks in cans were dispensed form vending machines. Vending machines that has a voice and do talking was introduce in 1981 and five years later machines accepted credit and debit cards were introduced.
By 1990 vending machines that took dollar bills directly became common. From 1971 to 1981 dollar coins were minted, very much because of the vending machine industry. In 2009 Coca-Cola Company introduced the ‘Freestyle’ machine, a touchscreen soda fountain which features more than one hundred different Coca-Cola drink products and custom flavors.
Modern history of vending machine
