Automatic Vending Machines

In high streets, railway stations, canteens, leisure centres and many other places we buy goods from automatic vending machines as a matter of course. Public telephones, electricity and gas meters and even parking meters are such familiar providers of services in exchange for a coin in the slot that they are almost taken for granted. Automatic vending has developed dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century but its origins go back a hundred years or more; indeed the earliest description of an automatic vending device - a dispenser of holy water - is much earlier, some 200 years BC. Of the early British machines the most evocative are the tall, thin, cast-iron ones which sold chocolate and cigarettes. These comparatively simple machines were to be seen everywhere. From such mechanical dispensers to modern electronic equipment selling all manner of goods and services while coping with a changing mixture of coins or even with plastic cards, the book illustrates the evolution of automatic vending machines as they have in turn responded to and stimulated social changes in a busy world.