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Advance Gumball

Advance Machine Company, Chicago, IL, c. early 1920s, 12 ¹/₂". Silent Salesmen Too calls this a "short-lived transitional machine." It succeeded the cast iron version of the Advance Gumball with its protruding #4 mech, and preceded the common rolled-steel Model D that had the later non-protruding mechanism. So along the series, first the body material changed but the mech didn't, and then the mech changed.

Silent Salesmen Too dates the cast iron version as c. 1920 and the Model D as c.1922, hence my date estimate of early 1920s for this version. Bill's date annotations typically indicated patent dates, not production dates, but in this case I think the production dates were pretty closely aligned with the patent dates. Note that Bill used the same name---Advance Gumball---for this model and the preceding cast iron version. That suggests that he considered them to be different versions of the same model but in Silent Salesmen Too he lists and describes them separately, which treats them as different models. It would be interesting to know what Advance called them in their catalogs.

I see about as many of these as I do of the cast iron version, and see far fewer of both of these than I see of Model Ds.

The example above is 100% original except for possibly perhaps the decal although I believe that's also original. I've never seen this decal on another globe; you can see it a little closer here. I'm a little perplexed by two aspects of the decal:

• The machine was made by the Advance Machine Company of Chicago, but the decal refers to the Advance Novelty Company of Des Moines, IA. Was that a real company? I can't find any reference to it online.

• The US post office didn't formally adopt two-letter state abbreviations until 1963, which is later than I'd expect this decal's birthdate to be. That doesn't mean two-letter abbreviations weren't used before then, but I don't think it was common practice.