Between about 1905 and 1930, the company's products included the Mills Violano-Virtuoso and its predecessors, celebrated machines that automatically played a violin and, after about 1909, a piano.

Mortimer Mills was granted United States patent 450,336 on 14 April 1891 for an improvement in "coin-actuated vending apparatus".

The improvement allowed the purchaser to select the product being sold and manipulate it so that it was carried to the point of delivery.

In 1904, Mills Novelty Company was an exhibitor at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

He would later establish a separate company, Bert E. Mills Corporation, and, in 1946, help to develop the first vending machines to sell hot coffee.

[13] In 1926, the company had moved to a plant of 375,000 square feet (34,800 m2), comprising a factory and administrative building, at 4100 Fullerton Avenue in the northwest of Chicago.

[6] In about 1935, Mills was engaged by Coca-Cola to produce a standing dry automatic cooled vendor for bottles.

[1] By the late 1930s, gum vending machines were being installed by Mills Automatic Merchandising Corporation of New York.

The machines made use of technology protected by United States patents assigned to Mills Novelty Company, including number 1,869,616.

[16][17] In 1940, the Mills company introduced Soundies, short 16mm musical films played in a coin-operated movie jukebox, its projection and sound mechanism made by RCA.

Wartime restrictions curtailed manufacturing of the jukeboxes, but the Mills company continued to produce and distribute new films for them into 1947.

During World War II, Mills received authorized federal funding to use its industrial facilities to produce bomb carriers, directional antenna, hand control slip rings, and poppet valves.

[2] Before the end of the year though, the President of the organization Fred L Mills died of a stomach ailment at age 49 in St. Charles, Illinois.

By some mechanism, it appears that the front grille medallion from the jukebox ended up being incorporated in the 1948 Tucker Sedan, as a horn button.

[20] By January 1948, the company was financially troubled and had petitioned the federal court for time to pay its debts.

In January 1951 it was reported that the industry manufacturing slot machines in the United States, then almost entirely based in Chicago, had suffered a major blow.

A bill had been signed which banned slot machines from federal property and prohibited their shipment in commerce between states.

However, component parts for the equipment were to be produced in the factories of F. L. Jacobs in Detroit, Traverse City, Michigan and Danville, Illinois.

[23] In November 1955, Mills Industries announced a project to consolidate, over a number of years, most of its operations in Traverse City, Michigan.

The machine was intended for use in factories or large offices, and the company claimed that it was a first of a kind in the United States.

The table below sets out their approximate comparative percentages of sales:[26] By the early 1960s, the Bell-O-Matic Corporation was being run by Tony Mills.

He sold the company to American Machine and Science, Inc. (AMSC) owned by Wallace E. Carroll (later the chairman of Katy Industries), reportedly for USD500,000.

The merged company failed to compete successfully with the electro/mechanical models produced by Bally and also suffered because it had not protected its intellectual property rights in Japan.

[30] The main inventor of the Mills Violano-Virtuoso was Henry Konrad Sandell, a contemporary of Thomas Edison, who was born in about 1878.

On 27 March 1905 Henry Sandell filed an application for a United States patent for an electric self playing violin.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office had a display of several significant inventions at the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909, including an early Violano-Virtuoso.

[32] The company used this event to promote the Violano-Virtuoso as "Designated by the U.S. Government as one of the eight greatest inventions of the decade" on all subsequent machines.

In locations that had 110 volts alternating current (or other types of power supply) the instruments were used with a unique converter unit.

The first page of the Violano Virtuoso manual stated that to lift the instrument from the delivery wagon would need "3 good men".

In addition to the Violano-Virtuoso, the Mills Novelty Company developed a variety of other automatic musical instruments.