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Dixie Cup Vendor

Dixie Cup Co., patented December 16, 1913; 32 ¹/₂". The front tag says "Dixie Cups," and then underneath that says "Property of Individual Drinking Cup Company, Easton, Penna., U.S.A." I don't know the relationship between the Dixie Cup Co. and the Individual Drinking Cup Co., but I'd bet it was tight. Like the coin-operated Puritan Cup dispenser, this seems to have been made expressly for a certain brand of cup.

The body is painted cast iron and the mechanism is aluminum. The customer would deposit a coin into the slot on the front and then pull the side handle forward. The vertical "vending wheel" carries a cup around the front part of a semicircle and deposits it into the customer's hand at the lower front part of the body. It's a neat design. If you look inside you can see that the edge of the vending wheel gets slightly narrower as the wheel moves through its arc, and therefore as the customer pulls the handle forward, the vending wheel actually pries one cup from the one nesting it. I think these take 5 oz. cups, but it's been a long time since I tested that so it may not be right.

This is the most common of the coin-operated cup vendors. In fact, it's the only coin-operated cup vendor I can remember seeing other than one Puritan Cup vendor and one earlier version of a Dixie Cup vendor. The tag on the front of this is killer, with two hands---index fingers extended---pointing left to the coin slot and right to the handle to be pulled.

Most of these are painted black, but I've seen several in green that have a less artistic front tag. Some glass globes have a green filigree design around the circumference of the globe about midway between the top and bottom. I once owned one of these machines with original green paint and a filigreed globe, and the serial number on that machine was higher than that on the black machine pictured above. Based on that I think the green version was made either later than or concurrently with the black version.

The example above is 100% original.