Like many promising game fads, Spotlight Golf gradually disappeared without much notice.

It was expensive, distribution was limited, and the UK was on the verge of its most devastating war.

However, Spotlight Golf did leave an impact. Next time, we'll discuss more about its pioneering technology.

In 1937, they started exporting the device: To Ireland, Canada, the U.S, and Australia.

The coin-op industry took an interest in the device, but it never became fully automated due to needing attendance for the ball and the net.

Though in Montreal they did try quarter-per-play pricing.

It certainly wasn't a low-class option for the sport.

Costing nearly 70 pounds for the operator and one shilling for nine holes, this wasn't the type of device one would simply find on a boardwalk.

Nevertheless, it made an impression at various exhibitions throughout the country.

Two professional golfers demonstrated the game at the Westminster Savoy Hotel to delighted journalists and onlookers.

EMI emphasized that Spotlight Golf was a perfect rainy-day replacement for getting out on the course.

A fuller explanation of the mechanics can be found by researchers working with the Australasian Golf Museum, who've done much work in attempting to preserve this game.

www.ausgolfmuseum.com/media/

The game, called Spotlight Golf, premiered for the British public in May 1936.

Relays were not a new invention in the 1930s, but recent advances in relay technology were entering telephone systems becoming feasible for use in industrial applications.

For the golf game, relays allowed for the reliable tracking of different 'states' of the game.

He partnered with Frank Allen Mitchell, an engineer who had done extensive work on phonographs for Columbia Phonograph before beginning work for Electrical and Musical Industries, or EMI.

His invention prior to working with Simon had involved a cutting-edge use of electrical relays.

This separation of literal space from the 'play area' was a big conceptual leap for arcade games.

But this version of the electric-powered golf machine never saw the light of day. It took a few more years of tinkering before Simon's invention came to fruition.

Remarkably, this information could then be displayed.

The golf course - represented by a rolled-up sheet on a rotating drum - would move according to where the player had reached in the course. A pointer indicated where precisely on the 'map' a player had reached.

First patented in 1933, his golf simulation did more than just measure swing strength.

Using a golf ball attached to a tether, players could whack the ball into a net and have it registered by the device. Gears and electrical components could transcribe how far the swing would have gone.

Louis John Simon was a UK inventor who found his usual work in material separation interrupted by the Great Depression.

He pivoted into electrical tech and was asked to create a device to measure the power of a golf drive. Despite having never played the game, he threw himself into the task.

The 1930s was a time of rapid development for electrical technology, which was reflected in the early days of the pinball industry.

Solenoids and electromagnets drove the action of early electro-mechanical pintables, and some novelty games went even further.

Modeling of sports in coin-op games was naturally limited by the physicality of a cabinet.

While many games abstracted some of the complex parts of a sport, this was especially troublesome for golf - which largely relies on wide-open ranges.

Yeah I think it was a mechanism problem. It's over 90, give it a break.