By turning a crank, the machine shuffles rapidly up to three decks of cards. “Nestor Johnson is producing a steel shuffler with chrome trim and rubber rollers. “Mechanical card shufflers appear to be moving well,” a 1950 issue of Billboard reported. He called it a “playing card shuffler device,” and within weeks, it was part of the Nestor assembly line. In 1950, he applied for a patent on a new product he hoped could provide a much needed new flow of revenue. in Hermosa, an experienced Johnson employee named Rudolph Notz was hard at work on this problem. Working at the company’s longtime headquarters on Springfield Ave. As competition started to mount from cheaper national sporting good suppliers in the post-war 1940s, however, the Nestor Johnson MFG Co. So, yeah, ice skates and all things related to them that’s where Johnson made its money for decades.
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You can get that full backstory by clicking below, or you can scroll on for some more info on the card shuffler.įor a history of the Nestor Johnson MFG Co’s far more lucrative and long lasting success in the ice skate business, check out our Johnsons Ice Skate page here or by clicking the image below. Planert & Sons and the Alfred Johnson Skate Co. Back in the 1920s, they were part of Chicago’s unofficial “Big Three” with F.W.
His business, as many former hockey players, figure skaters, and rink lovers will surely know, was something entirely different.įor the 40 years prior to the card shuffler’s debut in 1950, and at least another quarter century after, the Nestor Johnson MFG Company’s main stock and trade was ice skate manufacturing. You might go as far as to assume they were Nestor Johnson’s signature product, but in fact, Nestor Johnson himself never even knew these things existed. We have two such shufflers in our own collection, and in general, these short-lived devices remain surprisingly easy to find at your average neighborhood resale shop. While there were a few different crank-operated shufflers that appeared in the early 1950s-including one from Chicago’s Arrco Playing Card Co.-it was another Chicago company, Nestor Johnson, that really cornered the market. The age of the automatic card shuffler had begun. If an amateur card shark failed to evenly redistribute his hearts and clubs, his cohorts might elect to hit him with clubs until his heart stopped.įortunately, right at this point in history, a new option became available-an exceedingly less cool one by comparison, but an alternative nonetheless. And I’m not just talking about the carpal tunnel and paper cuts.
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The risks of the manual shuffle, however-much like the cigarette smoking-were numerous and potentially deadly. Skillfully shuffling a deck of cards, much like stoically smoking a pack of cigarettes, was a universal method of establishing one’s coolness in 1950s America.
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