The richly decorated NEW CENTURY DETROIT was a lot better looking than the old slab cabinet Caille-Schiemer and later Caille Bros. They’d get killed if they put “20th Century” on an upgrade, so they picked another pop expression of the day for their remakes of 1901, batting out “New Century” machines. You could make a new machine or a new model of an old machine and call it the “20th Century Something.” Mills copped the name fast for their brand new TWENTIETH CENTURY floor machine, so Caille Bros. Well, their things do but their basic thinking doesn’t. In our own day, there’s the “Mark II” anything, and the beginning usage of expressions about “21st Century Technology.” We’ve come full circle, proving that people never really seem to change. Witness the Bally DRAW BELL and the later DELUXE DRAW BELL.
Post-war Bally and Keeney slot machines added words in much the same way.
Evidenced are the old World War II Boeing FLYING FORTRESS and SUPERFORTRESS bombers. Back in the forties and fifties we used to add the word “super” to everything to mean a later, improved or larger model. It was as easy to proliferate models way back when as it is today.
