1950 Johnson Card Shuffler

1950 Johnson Card Shuffler

Nestor Johnson MFG Co., 1900 N. Springfield Ave., Chicago, IL

I've had this for a long time it's a manual crank card shuffler made by Nestor Johnson. The Chicago museum has a 1951 model, but mine is earlier since it says Pat Pend.

It's capable of shuffling one, two, or three decks. You place half a deck on each side, crank the handle and then pick up the shuffler and you repeat one more time.

NESTOR JOHNSON
While there were a few different crank-operated shufflers that appeared in the early 1950s—including one from Chicago’s Arrco Playing Card Co.—it was another Chicago company, Nestor Johnson, that really cornered the market.

**In the next post, we will see my battery operated Arrco shuffler.**

For the 40 years prior to the card shuffler’s debut in 1950, and at least another quarter century after, the Nestor Johnson MFG Company’s main stock and trade was ice skate manufacturing. Back in the 1920s, they were part of Chicago’s unofficial “Big Three”.

As competition started to mount from cheaper national sporting good suppliers in the post-war 1940s, the Nestor Johnson MFG Co. needed to start looking for alternative revenue streams.

Working at the company’s longtime headquarters on Springfield Ave. in Hermosa, an experienced Johnson employee named Rudolph Notz was hard at work on this problem. In 1950, he applied for a patent on a new product he hoped could provide a much needed new flow of revenue. He called it a “playing card shuffler device,” and within weeks, it was part of the Nestor assembly line.