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Who was Gordon Horlick? The unsung designer of Williams Pinball?


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Some may have heard that in May of last year (2009) my company, Pinball Inc., purchased a large portion of assets from Illinois Pinball Company. Included in these assets were all the Williams/Bally, Alvin G., and Capcom parts (minus cab art, some playfields, some translites, and backglasses). Also included was a heap of original Williams/Bally tooling.

 

But the crown jewel of the entire purchase was one of the largest if not the largest collection of original documentation of the Williams and Bally pinball companies. I estimate that we have somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 documents including the original files for the Williams pinball machines starting with machine #1.

 

Greg (of RTBB) has been here and has seen all of it and has even opened a few boxes so he can attest to the absolutely remarkable mountain of unbelievable information that is here (he really liked the Madonna pinball concept drawings by Python Angelo). I have been invited to do some stories in Pingame about the history that is sitting in these boxes so I am starting to go through some of it.

 

I've started with the Williams files going back to the first machines (from the 1940's) and the one name that keeps popping up is Gordon Horlick. It seems he was the chief engineer for Williams at the very beginning and was there until at least the 70's. While Harry may have gotten most of the credit for game design it appears the real man behind the designs may have been Gordon. As I now find myself intrigued about this person whom I knew nothing about until these files I am going to do some research and see if I can create a detailed bio of Mr. Horlick. If anyone knows anything about Gordon please let me know.

 

What I plan to do is make periodic updates to this thread as I gather info about Gordon. I'll do some similar posts on RGP but to be honest I feel a continued thread there would just get lost so that is why I would like to keep the main thread going here in a more "cozy" environment. If it goes well then as I dig up more subject matters or goodies I'll do other threads of a similar nature. :)

 

Cheers.

-James

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Awesome post James. :023: Great to see you posting here again and I look forward to some more updates and pinball trivia when you get the time.

 

I have made the thread sticky, so it is easy to find in the Pinball Forum. Later, if it becomes very popular and more facts and trivia are posted, we will create a sub-forum for this stuff so it can be searched for quickly and easily by pinheads who love these facts and trivia.

 

Cheers,

 

Dan

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Wow James!

 

All that history - really hope at least some of it sees the light of day for the guys that are right into the history of these games.

 

All I know is that Gordon Horlock was Chief Engineer of Williams around the 1950 - 60s era.

 

Maybe if you get to Pinball Expo this year have a chat to Steve Kordek - he would be the guy to give you all the answers you need

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Awesome post James. :023: Great to see you posting here again and I look forward to some more updates and pinball trivia when you get the time.

 

I have made the thread sticky, so it is easy to find in the Pinball Forum. Later, if it becomes very popular and more facts and trivia are posted, we will create a sub-forum for this stuff so it can be searched for quickly and easily by pinheads who love these facts and trivia.

 

Cheers,

 

Dan

 

Thanks Dan, I truly appreciate it. It's good to be back after spending 5 months in the really backwards town of Bloomington (I call it Bloomingidiotown), Illinois. I owe a big thanks to Greg Berry as he made the trip over twice and was a great help. There are stories to be told about all that as well. :)

 

Wow James!

 

All that history - really hope at least some of it sees the light of day for the guys that are right into the history of these games.

 

All I know is that Gordon Horlock was Chief Engineer of Williams around the 1950 - 60s era.

 

Maybe if you get to Pinball Expo this year have a chat to Steve Kordek - he would be the guy to give you all the answers you need

 

I did get a chance to chat with Steve at last years expo as I took just a couple pieces of this history with us and he was floored to see it still existed. His getting up in years so conversations with him are somewhat brief. At that time I had only spotted Gordons name so I didn't know enough about him to ask anything other than did he (Steve) know Gordon. His response to me was, "yes I knew him well...I'm the one that took over his position."

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Thanks Dan, I truly appreciate it. It's good to be back after spending 5 months in the really backwards town of Bloomington (I call it Bloomingidiotown), Illinois. I owe a big thanks to Greg Berry as he made the trip over twice and was a great help. There are stories to be told about all that as well. :)

 

I reckon quite a few of us would have loved to have been in Greg's shoes. :cool:

 

I watched Pins & Vids #3 - Revenge of the Myth dvd, again late last week, where Al Warner and Paul Kiefert drove down to Bloomington, Illinois to pick up Al's Big Bang Bar pinball. It was an interesting dvd which showed a bit of the town and Gene's warehouse where the BBB's were stored. Pretty cool watching it again.

 

I have been doing some light reading and found some cool old Pinball Expo transcripts written by Russ Jensen, where they mention Gordon Horlock, WILLIAM's chief engineer, in the speeches.

 

Cheers,

 

Dan

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Doing some reading today, it appeared I had a slight mystery to resolve before continuing which is the spelling of Gordons last name. Some books and sites spell his name "Horlock" and some info showed the spelling to "Horlick". Most of the early documents in the files only had his initials "GTH" which btw he was very very good at putting his initials on almost all his work (THANK YOU GORDON!). I found this original test game play sheet from the Rainbow pinball file which has his full signature and the mystery is solved....

 

 

His signature shows the correct spelling to be Horlick. :D

 

Tomorrow I should have a bit of info of his beginnings at Williams.

 

SCAN0016.jpg

 

Aussiearcade.jpg

Edited by pinballace
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fantastic stuff james - and straight to the heart of the hobby which is why many members here will hang on reading this thread - I'm excited contemplating all these records that have been locked away for so long. a big thank you! :)

 

there will be many members not familiar with you or your business but if they have bought replacement ramps for their machines then they will have dealt with your company. Greg from RTBB sells a lot of James' gear which is stronger and better than the originals IMO. The wH20 ramps i purchased well over a year and several hundreds of games ago still look fantastic and James was also instrumental in sourcing me a NOS orginal WH20 topper! (thanks again! and also to greg who carted it all around the globe!)

 

looking forward to updates :)

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But the crown jewel of the entire purchase was one of the largest if not the largest collection of original documentation of the Williams and Bally pinball companies. I estimate that we have somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 documents including the original files for the Williams pinball machines starting with machine #1.

 

i assume this will all be scanned to pdf and preserved rather then left on paper to rot and be lost forever

 

 

i'd be happy to help out with the scanning so long as you pay frieght to/from my door

 

i have a hp 6300c colour scanner with cut sheet feeder, a4 size to help scan stuff

 

if you want a sample of my work i can help out

 

i helped scan over 6 years worth of "rainbow" magazine for the tandy colour computer last year, took me 6 months to do so and many thousands of pages and other magazines for the coco as well

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i assume this will all be scanned to pdf and preserved rather then left on paper to rot and be lost forever

 

 

i'd be happy to help out with the scanning so long as you pay frieght to/from my door

 

i have a hp 6300c colour scanner with cut sheet feeder, a4 size to help scan stuff

 

if you want a sample of my work i can help out

 

i helped scan over 6 years worth of "rainbow" magazine for the tandy colour computer last year, took me 6 months to do so and many thousands of pages and other magazines for the coco as well

 

Thanks for the offer, very generous. You are 100% correct this information needs to be scanned and archived! We've purchased a large scanner and have started scanning. It's going to take a LONG LONG time. Our goal is to set this stuff up like the pinball data base so that it is available for all to see.

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Based on some personal information I would say that Gordon and Harry Williams hit it off at the very beginning and were very close. Harry Williams was an avid general aviation pilot and Gordon trained pilots in WWII. It would not be a stretch to say that Gordon's flying background was the instant bond between him and Harry. It is said that Harry and Gordon would take the afternoons and spend the time flying a "Link Trainer" that Harry owned. Basically, work in the morning and play in the afternoon...what a job.

 

The Williams Company is said to have been started as early as 1943. They basically "reworked" other manufactures machines until 1946 when they produced their first official Williams Pinball machine called "Suspense". Williams began the machine model count with Suspense being #1. At this time I am not sure if Gordon Horlich was at Williams from day one, in the files his name first appears on a hand drawn schematic for Williams 11th machine which was "Ginger". The date on the drawing is 8-19-47 (August 19, 1947).

 

There are quite a few drawings and wiring documents in the Ginger folder which have Gordon’s GTH initials on them. The one thing that is most intriguing about these documents is how raw they are in that they are hand drawn on plain paper. It really reflects the basic beginnings of the Williams pinball company and also reflect the era.

 

The real prize in the folder is the original playfield drawing! :) It is very basic but that is how they designed the playfield layouts back then. Looking at the drawing and writing on it, it does not appear that Gordon did the layout on this machine but all the schematic and other engineer type drawings indicate that he did the electrical design for Ginger.

 

Ginger1.jpg

 

Ginger2.jpg

 

gingerdrawings.jpg

 

Gingerplayfield.jpg

 

gingerplayfield2.jpg

 

Gingerschem.jpg

Ginger1.thumb.jpg.ff2968466a9b407f9f99b93fb5ae867f.jpg

Ginger2.jpg.c362f99368db84a0a123d01c54369b02.jpg

Gingerschem.thumb.jpg.577d8a8a91a1bb3d4b347ecf7f1eceea.jpg

gingerdrawings.thumb.jpg.39701f0c49c0fa2230aec635adc8d952.jpg

Gingerplayfield.thumb.jpg.c5acb457420970af3d1eb3736aad0898.jpg

gingerplayfield2.jpg.697f71518e9bd719507968410dba0efe.jpg

Edited by Arcade King
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Based on some personal information I would say that Gordon and Harry Williams hit it off at the very beginning and were very close. Harry Williams was an avid general aviation pilot and Gordon trained pilots in WWII. It would not be a stretch to say that Gordon's flying background was the instant bond between him and Harry. It is said that Harry and Gordon would take the afternoons and spend the time flying a "Link Trainer" that Harry owned. Basically, work in the morning and play in the afternoon...what a job.

 

The Williams Company is said to have been started as early as 1943. They basically "reworked" other manufactures machines until 1946 when they produced their first official Williams Pinball machine called "Suspense". Williams began the machine model count with Suspense being #1. At this time I am not sure if Gordon Horlich was at Williams from day one, in the files his name first appears on a hand drawn schematic for Williams 11th machine which was "Ginger". The date on the drawing is 8-19-47 (August 19, 1947).

 

There are quite a few drawings and wiring documents in the Ginger folder which have Gordon’s GTH initials on them. The one thing that is most intriguing about these documents is how raw they are in that they are hand drawn on plain paper. It really reflects the basic beginnings of the Williams pinball company and also reflect the era.

 

The real prize in the folder is the original playfield drawing! :) It is very basic but that is how they designed the playfield layouts back then. Looking at the drawing and writing on it, it does not appear that Gordon did the layout on this machine but all the schematic and other engineer type drawings indicate that he did the electrical design for Ginger.

 

:o WOW!

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Thanks for the offer, very generous. You are 100% correct this information needs to be scanned and archived! We've purchased a large scanner and have started scanning. It's going to take a LONG LONG time. Our goal is to set this stuff up like the pinball data base so that it is available for all to see.

 

 

if u need tips on how to do it all for free and turn it in to pdf i can help

 

also, if you have pages that are bigger then an a4 scanner, i suggest get an A3 scanner

 

u can get them from "escam" for about $300

 

sssoooo much easier to do this then to scan the pages in hits and then try and join.

 

also adjust the brightness/contrast as well so to blow away the background of the pages as im sure the older stuff will be starting to turn yellow and perhaps even mouldy as well

 

this will make the page background damn near white and reduce the size of the pdf file when saved also

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if u need tips on how to do it all for free and turn it in to pdf i can help

 

also, if you have pages that are bigger then an a4 scanner, i suggest get an A3 scanner

 

u can get them from "escam" for about $300

 

sssoooo much easier to do this then to scan the pages in hits and then try and join.

 

also adjust the brightness/contrast as well so to blow away the background of the pages as im sure the older stuff will be starting to turn yellow and perhaps even mouldy as well

 

this will make the page background damn near white and reduce the size of the pdf file when saved also

 

Right now we have a Brother scanner which does A3/Ledger size and it scans pdf. It's autofeed as well but I don't trust the autofeed with these old documents.

 

The scanner I'm using for the Gordon stuff is just a simple HP scanner for quicky scans of the pages as I sorting through them. The stuff you're seeing here will not be what we end up putting into the archive. The fun scans will be the larger drawings which are up to a meter long by half meter wide. There's a local mob that will do those in B/W for about $1 each. The expensive stuff is the colour, that they charge by the sq. area so it can run between $5-10 a scan.

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Right now we have a Brother scanner which does A3/Ledger size and it scans pdf. It's autofeed as well but I don't trust the autofeed with these old documents.

 

The scanner I'm using for the Gordon stuff is just a simple HP scanner for quicky scans of the pages as I sorting through them. The stuff you're seeing here will not be what we end up putting into the archive. The fun scans will be the larger drawings which are up to a meter long by half meter wide. There's a local mob that will do those in B/W for about $1 each. The expensive stuff is the colour, that they charge by the sq. area so it can run between $5-10 a scan.

 

absolutely do not use document feeder on old paper

it will rip them to shreds, its not a question of if...its WHEN :(

 

the big stuff wont be a issue to a proper scanner shop

 

theres scanners around i have seen/worked on with a bed about 18 foot wide....fuggin monsters they are and i have no doubt there is bigger around as well

 

remember to scan the documents at a high quality say 300 dpi

 

overkill i know

 

but

 

your better off scanning to high to start with as you can set it aside as a master and reduce quality from the master and keep the master safe

 

but if you do a low quality scan for a master, you will always have a low qulaity master and you cant make it better unless you rescan

 

also, one thing i also learnt was to make high quality pdf files at 300 dpi then convert them to djvu

 

the djvu files were about 10% of the pdf file size and so long as you told it to convert pdf to djvu at 400dpi it turned out just as good as the 300 dpi pdf

 

djvu is a "lossy" format, hence why the size is so small compared to pdf, so wind up the convert resolution

 

this can all be done for free with Ubuntu Linux

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Thanks for all the info and advice, I'm sure when we get full on with the scanning of this I'll need assistance.

 

no worries

i have an 8 page tutorial i have written on the topic on how to do it all in ubuntu that i submitted to "full circle magazine" some time ago and sent it all over the planet to others wishing to do the same with magazines in their collections

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