"Gumball Machines" for UPPERCASE Magazine

Musings on the history of the gumball machine - UPPERCASE Magazine Issue #4

It's amazing that we've become so accepting of the idea of making a transaction with a machine. And yet a century of vending machines has brought us along in little steps to this point. One can imagine first the dubiousness and then the sense of novelty that much have greeted the first automated postcard vending machines in the streets of London in the 1880s. And while those early designs -- and the candy dispensers that came to North America a decade later -- are like crude golems in comparison to the sophisticated automated transactions of today, they were a significant step. A transaction requires two participants, and up until those first vending machines, this meant two people. 

This was a really fun piece, but one that took a while to write. Janine asked me to do a little piece with musings gumball machines, and I struggled for a bit to find the right angle for the piece. In the end, I'm really happy with how this little essay turned out; it's one of my favorites that I've done for UPPERCASE, touching on golems, the Turing test, and random number generators.