Theatre tokens such as this were issued about 1900 by a machine called The Accurate Check Taker, which could issue tickets for the Pit and the Stalls. The museum has one of these machines, which shows that the central hole in the metal token was for one of the prongs in the machine on which the tokens were stacked. The patron paid for a ticket, a handle was turned which worked a counter for the number of tickets sold, and the patron was issued with a token engraved with the name of the part of the theatre for which they had paid - in this case the Pit, or the area nearest the stage. The token should have been surrendered to an attendant at the entrance to the auditorium.

Before this ticket machine was invented, theatre tokens had no central hole and appeared to be more like coins. They were still issued by the box office, unless they were season tickets, and the business of tallying the number of tokens with the receipts for each performance would have been far more arduous and time-consuming.