The Tilt mechanism was invented by
Harry Williams, founder of the
Williams game company. The use of "
body english" when playing early pinball games was getting out of control. Williams witnessed one player bashing the bottom of one of his machines to make the pinball pop out of lower scoring holes. His first solution was to place sharp nails under the machine to, err, discourage this sort of bashing. He quickly realized this wasn't the best solution. He developed a mechanism called the "
stool pigeon". The idea was a metal ball sat on a
golf tee and excessive machine shaking would knock the ball off the tee and that would cause the game to reset.
The first pinball machine he installed the "stool pigeon" device on was called
Advance. He watched how people dealt with this new mechanism. One player giving the machine excessive nudging activated the stool pigeon device and exclaimed "I hit it and it tilted!".
In a flash of insight, Williams realized "tilt" was a much better name than "stool pigeon". Eventually Williams replaced the metal ball mechanism with a
pendulum device that became standard on all pinball games.
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