Did Sir Francis Galton invent pachinko?

In the Galton biography I'm reading, I've reached the famous lecture in 1877 where Galton introduced the concepts of regression and correlation. To illustrate to the crowd the normal probability distribution, which had been discovered much earlier by Gauss, Galton, who was as much an inventor as anything else, introduced the quincunx or Galton Board, which was pretty much what we'd think of as a pachinko game -- you pour steel balls into the top of rows of pegs and watch them wind up in buckets at the bottom in roughly a bell-shaped curve. Here's a simulation of Galton's quincunx.

The modern Japanese pachinko game, which has been a huge pastime in Japan for a half century was apparently introduced in Nagoya after WWII, but it's easy to imagine the original idea came from Galton. Of course, the man who turned it into a gambling game was the real business genius.

Also, I've always wondered if there is a connection between the Japanese bell curve game obsession and their more general interest in statistics, as exemplified by their fervent adoption of Edward Deming's statistical quality control philosophy.

Finally, it's encouraging to note that Galton introduced regression analysis, one of the great leaps forward in the history of human analytical capability, at the relatively advanced aged of 55. We've become so used to hearing about how only young men have big new ideas that Galton's productivity as a middle-aged man is striking.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer