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Wood Pulver

Pulver Chemical Co., Rochester, NY, pat. 1899, 24". As of November 2021 I'd managed to acquire some really nice Pulvers over the years, including multiple colors of the short-case Pulver, a tall-case Pulver, a duplicate set of tin-litho Pulvers, and even nontraditional models such as the Hi Hi and the Self-Service Pulver---but the Wood Pulver had always eluded me. Or to be more accurate, I'd had a couple of chances to buy one but I hadn't been able to confirm the quality or else the price was higher than I was willing to pay for it. The one pictured above was on a seller's table at the November 2021 Chicagoland and changed my Wood-Pulverless status.

I wanted a Wood Pulver because it's the first Pulver, and who doesn't want the first of a long line? The illustrious history of Pulver started with a single-column machine coupled with a Yellow Kid automaton in a wood case, like the one above. A few different types of wood cases were made and according to Silent Salesmen Too this is not the first of those, but I'm sure that not much time passed between that first one and this one.

It's an impressive machine but after I bought it and got to looking at it more closely, three things struck me as unusual about the model's design:

• It's quite a bit bigger than it needs to be---or would be ideal---for a shopkeeper, bar owner, or hotelier with finite counter space. The footprint on this is 13" wide by 10¹/₂" deep, and that's a lotta countertop area to dedicate to a gum machine, especially considering that the core of this machine is one skinny column and the Yellow Kid. Look at the floor of the machine's product compartment and you're looking at a lot of space that could be used for something else. I'm guessing that this model was a hard sell to shopkeepers et al. but the novelty of a moving character did the trick. Add the 24-inch height and you get a total area of 1.9 ft³. That doesn't sound as big as it looks on a stand or countertop, but in person it's pretty substantial for a gum machine. Not, like, Moon-Rocket big, but it's a big enclosure for one skinny column. If you're cramped for space then the sheer size of this thing would be a big disincentive to buying it. No other Pulver takes up this much countertop space so perhaps they learned from it.

• The column for the gum has a wood wall on each side of it and one in back, so the only access to the column is from the front. Because of the rear wall, the column is not accessible from the rear which is where the machine's door is. A route guy can't just reach in from the rear and drop gum into the column all easy-like; no, he's gotta reach around from the back to the front and load the gum from the front, and unless he has the arm of an orangutan then he's doing it blindly. I loaded pieces one at a time and it felt awkward, although with practice I could probably work my way up to two or three pieces with each reach. Even then, it's a slow and maddening way to restock the product.

• Looking here you can see a rod extending from the column toward the front of the machine just below the stack. A piece of gum that's pushed from the bottom of the stack is supposed to fall into the opening below and in front of the stack---from where it then gets delivered to the customer---but that rod is directly in line with that fall. That gum is gonna hit the rod and it's gonna twist and then continue its fall on the left or the right of the rod, but not in the middle as it would if the rod weren't there. If everyone's lucky then the gum won't stray far enough left or right to miss the opening, but I'd bet that it missed and ended up on the floor of the inner sanctum often enough to be frustrating.

This model may have been sold with a homey placard, examples of which can be seen in the Wood Pulver pictures in Silent Salesmen Too, page 127. This machine had one when I bought it (you can see it here), but I removed it because it was an "aged" replica, not an original. An original placard in this machine would be awesome, but knowing it's a repro it struck me as a bit cheesy.