Here’s What Was in the First Ever Vending Machine

The present is in knots over the rightly deserved fear of robots taking human jobs. Even I, who was supposed to be in one of the robot-proofed professions due to creativity, suddenly have a personal investment in artificial intelligence. Who would pay me my outrageous wages when they could simply use an algorithm that thinks Yoda was on the Miami Dolphins at one point because of a fanfic it scraped? 

There is one robotic employee, though, that is almost always greeted with a smile and possibly, a sigh of relief: the humble vending machine. It knows its lane and excels in it, due to its ability to do what no human can — keep sodas cold inside its body.

In 2024, they’re ubiquitous, and in Japan, they practically make up their own branch of the evolutionary tree. So you have to wonder where it all started. Similarly, keeping in mind the symbiotic relationship between a vending machine and its contents, what was the product it traded in order to feast on delicious coins? Was it lemonade? Cigarettes? Medicinal tonics that were effectively just bottles of opium? 

No, none of the above. Not only am I willing to wager that the first vending machine came about a lot earlier than you would guess, I’d happily double down on your inability to guess what came out of it.

That’s because the first-ever vending machine was utilized all the way back in the 1st century A.D. — by the Christian church. No, it didn’t dispense indulgences, though that would have been awesome, and probably have inspired rampant sinning in a 10-foot radius of the machine. What it did dispense, as if it was Fruitopia or Surge, was holy water. 

Apparently, there was a real problem with people taking more holy water than they paid for. As a non-Christian, this is surprising on two levels because first, I didn't think that was something you bought, and second, hoarding holy water seems like a heavy-handed metaphor, not a real problem.

Nevertheless, everyone wanted as much of this water as they could get. It was like reverse Dasani. Thus, a man named Hero of Alexandria, which I assure you is his name and not a placeholder I forgot to remove, designed a solution. People would be given tokens that they could trade for their allotment of holy water, like they were in some sort of divine Dave & Buster’s. When they put the token into the holy water machine, the weight would carry a lever down, and that in turn would open a godly little sluice, pouring holy water into their preferred receptacle. 

When the token jumped ship upon reaching the lever’s nadir, the door would shut, and His wet blessing would cease.

More than two millennia later, that technology has evolved to the point where it gives me Cherry Dr. Pepper, which I consider a work of God in its own right.