While pinball-like games – i.e., glass-fronted inclined tables with bells, bumpers, and spring-loaded ball launchers – were developed in France as early as the mid 1700s, these examples were games of chance, lacking any mechanism for the player to manipulate the ball once it was in play. Initial experiments in introducing an element of player skill by adding flippers proved unsatisfactory, as even the most efficient mechanical flippers were too weak to propel the ball all the way up the table. Pinball would not realise its modern form until the 1940s, with the introduction of power-assisted flippers driven by small electric motors; this final step could in theory have taken place much earlier, the first commercially viable small electric motors having been developed in the 1880s, but economic factors made it impractical.
At this point, one may note that Bram Stoker's famous novel Dracula takes place around 1897.
Thus, permitting only slight anachronism, it is just barely historically possible for Count Dracula to have owned a pinball machine.
