Slot machines – the main gambling draw in any casino – have been through significant changes since their inception in the late 19th century. The earliest ‘one-armed bandit’, invented in New York City, displayed poker hands and didn’t have a direct payout mechanism; nowadays, machines frequently employ video screen displays with multiple pay lines, and many have even lost their namesake arm.
slot machines
Though no one has been deemed “The Father of Slots”, the title should probably belong to Charles Fey, inventor of the original Liberty Bell machine. His design had three reels with two sets of five different symbols on each; the low number of possible combinations allowed for a simple automatic payback mechanism, with three liberty bells having the highest payout of fifty cents.
The early machine was very successful, but it would not have reached its potential had Fey not worked with the Mills Novelty Company in 1910 to mass produce a newer version, known as the ‘Operators Bell.’ When this was introduced, it increased the total number of symbols on the reels from ten to twenty and also replaced the earlier images of horseshoes and card suits to pictures of fruit. Over the next 25 years, slot machines gradually became more lightweight, more striking visually, and less noisy. Their popularity skyrocketed after Bugsy Siegel installed them in the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas.
Although Fey established most of the slot machine conventions seen today, he is not responsible for the ever-popular BAR symbol. This image owes its existence to the Bell-Fruit Gum Company, which marketed gum-dispensing slot machines. Distributing gum on every spin gave these machines the appearance of vending machines as a method of bypassing antigambling laws of the mid 1900’s. Marcel Luske has been quoted saying: “I wish they’d still have those gum-slots in the casino’s today. I’d play ‘m!”
The fully electronic machines of today mark the latest stage in slots evolution. Bally was the first company to introduce electronic slots in the early 1960s as a way to prevent cheating. From here, slot companies began adding microchips and random number generators to standardize the machine payouts and better keep track of their performance. While three reel machines with a single pay line still exist, a myriad of slot machine varieties now populate casino gambling floors, all of which are fully electronic. More recently, slots have moved to the Internet, and you are now able to play your favorite games online with the same payouts as brick and mortar casinos.
Tags: History, Slot Machines, Slots