Largest pinball museum in US to open

Decades after he slept under a pinball machine wedged into his cramped apartment, David Silverman will open the US' largest museum dedicated to speeding silver balls and fast-motion flippers.

The National Pinball Museum will open in November in the heart of Baltimore's tourist district and will include exhibits on the history of pinball - its beginnings in 18th-century France, its move to the US, the advent of the flipper in 1946 and, later, digital technology.

The museum will be stocked with up to 900 pinball machines from Silverman's collection, ranging from an original French bagatelle game with pins and no flippers to a Stars Wars-type game, one of just 15 ever made.

"Pinball is more than a game," Silverman said from the museum's new home. "We aren't building an arcade, we are building a museum."

The museum will also feature space for private parties, educational programs and two floors of "pay-to-play" pinball machines.

Silverman, in his 60s, a landscape designer from suburban Washington, D.C., got his first pinball machine when he was in his 20s. He kept it in his apartment, where he had no other option but to sleep beneath it.

Soon he married, moved to larger quarters, and his collection grew to 300 machines that he kept in a backyard storage building.

At his wife Mimi's suggestion, Silverman opened the space as a museum. He now owns 900 pinball machines.

The collection outgrew his property and was moved to a larger space in Washington, D.C. Now, the National Pinball Museum is graduating to the four-story brick and glass building in Baltimore.