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Jackpot!
by
Bob Brooke
Fortunes
waited to be had. All it took was to insert a nickel and pull a lever
releasing three reels. And the winner came up all cherries. The bell
rang as coins tumbled into the cup below. Jackpot!
For many, the slot machine became a symbol of gambling. The term "slot
machine" originated from the slots on the machine for inserting and
retrieving coins. The machine's standard layout features a screen
displaying three or more reels that "spin" when a player activates it by
pulling the lever attached to its side. Players also began calling slot
machines "one-armed bandits," because of the large mechanical levers
affixed to the sides of early mechanical machines, and to their ability
to empty players' pockets and wallets as thieves would.
Today,
hundreds of slot machines fill rooms in casinos all over the country
thanks to Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn, New York, who developed the
first gambling machine in 1891. Based on poker, it contained five drums
displaying 10 different card faces on each. The machine was extremely
popular, and soon many New York bars had one or more of them. Players
would insert a nickel and pull a lever, which would spin the drums and
the card faces they held with players hoping for a good poker hand. The
machine had no direct payout mechanism, so a pair of kings might get the
player a free beer, while a royal flush could pay out cigars or drinks;
as a bar owner saw fit.
To improve the odds for the bar, Sittman and Pitt typically removed two
cards from the deck—the ten of spades and the jack of hearts—doubling
the odds against winning a royal flush. The drums could also be
rearranged to further reduce a player's chance of winning. Because of
the vast number of possible wins in the original poker-based game, it
proved practically impossible to make a machine capable of awarding an
automatic payout for all possible winning combinations.
Charles Fey, a mechanic in San Francisco, made a slot machine of cast
iron called the Liberty Bell. But before he did that, his friend Gustav
Schultze, an inventor, created the nickel slot based on horseracing in
1893.
Schultze’s
Horseshoes slot game paid two nickels if the wheel landed on one of 10
horseshoes. If players landed on a joker, they got a free drink. The
remaining 14 out of 25 symbols were worth nothing. Fey made his own
version of Horsehoes in 1894. Fey’s breakthrough game, known as the
4-11-44, followed in 1895. Building it in his basement, using wood that
happened to be lying around for the cabinetry, he installed his first
4-11-44 in a local saloon.
In 1895, Fey created a simpler automatic mechanism with three spinning
reels containing a total of five symbols: horseshoes, diamonds, spades,
hearts and a Liberty Bell, which eventually gave the machine its name.
By replacing 10 cards with five symbols and using three reels instead of
five drums, the complexity of reading a win was considerably reduced,
allowing Fey to design an effective automatic payout mechanism. Three
bells in a row produced the biggest payoff, 10 nickels or 50 cents.
Thanks to the enthusiastic response, Fey built several more, and by 1896
he was devoting himself full time to the manufacture of slot machines.
In 1898, Fey created the Card Bell, the first machine able to pay
winnings to customers automatically. That machine evolved in 1899 into
the Liberty Bell, of which only about 100 were made. The machine had a
cast-iron arm, a metal case, and a horizontal window revealing the
symbols on the machine’s internal reels. Three bells were worth 20
coins; two horseshoes and a star earned you four. And because of its
ability to provide automatic payouts, historians consider the Liberty
Bell slot machine to officially have been the first slot machine.
Because
of the gaming laws in Fey's home state of California, he was unable to
get a patent for his machine. It was a key loophole that allowed major
rivals like Caille Brothers, Mills Novelty Company, and Bally to muscle
in.
Liberty Bell was a huge success and spawned a thriving mechanical gaming
device industry. After a few years, California banned the machines, but
Fey still couldn’t keep up with the demand for them. The Liberty Bell
machine was so popular that many slot machine makers copied it. One of
them, Chicago-based Herbert Mills, produced his own version of the
Liberty Bell, The Operators Bell, in 1907. It used three reels of
different fruit symbols, thus the nickname 'fruit machines.' The Mills
Novelty Company. was also the first slot machine to use the BAR symbol
on the reels, which can still be found in slots today. By 1908, "bell"
machines had been installed in cigar stores, brothels and barber shops.
Before he knew it, Fey was competing with Eastern manufacturers such as
Illinois, Clawson, Caille, Watling, and Mills, who gave their machines
names like Golden Gate and California Bear.
The
first Liberty Bell machines produced by Mills used the same symbols on
the reels as did Charles Fey's original. Later, a similar machine called
the Operator's Bell was produced that included the option of adding a
gum-vending attachment. As the gum offered was fruit-flavored, fruit
symbols were placed on the reels: lemons, cherries, oranges and plums. A
bell was retained, and a picture of a stick of Bell-Fruit Gum, the
origin of the bar symbol, was also present. This set of symbols proved
highly popular and was used by other companies that began to make their
own slot machines: Caille, Watling, Jennings and Pace.
Almost from the beginning, the states where slot machines could be found
banned cash payouts. For a while, manufacturers engineered machines to
pay customers in trade checks, which could then be redeemed, but the
states also outlawed that practice in 1902. Curiously, around the same
time, a specialized type of slot machine known as a "trade stimulator"
escaped regulation. These machines paid out in cigars: Not
coincidentally, a San Francisco police commissioner named Moses Gunst
owned a chain of cigar stores and had a silent interest in Reliance,
which made many of these so-called cigar machines.
The
San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed most of the local
slot-machine manufacturers. But the overwhelming number of slot machines
in San Francisco led to a citywide ban in 1909.
To stay in business, manufacturers revamped their slots as gum vending
machines. For example, the Mills O.K. Gum Vender—the "O.K." was meant to
signal its compliance with the law—dispensed gum with each nickel
played, and also paid "Profit Sharing Dividends" as tokens.
During the 1910s, Mills, Caille, and Watling rose to become the big
players. The enactment of the Volstead Act in 1919 brought on
Prohibition which aided these manufacturers by created speakeasies, a
lucrative new market for their slot machines. Sales of machines soared
throughout the 1920s and by the 1930s, as the Great Depression gripped
the country, sales rose even higher. In that decade, Mills’ clad its
Silent line of gooseneck machines in beautifully designed cases, some
featuring red lions, others resembling Art Deco skyscrapers.
In
1938, Bally created the Double Bell, which allowed the player to play a
nickel slot on one side and a quarter on the other.
After World War II, slot machine manufacturers shifted their focus to
the new gambling market in Nevada. Gambling had been legalized there on
a county-by-county basis in 1931, but things took off after Nevada
passed changes in tax and license laws passed in 1945.
Jennings
produced the first post-war slot machine in 1945, the Bronze Chief, and
its Super Deluxe Club Chief from 1946 was the first illuminated slot.
Mills’ High Top nickel slots became standard in many casinos, as did
Mills’ Black Gold. Another typical sight in a late-1940s and early-1950s
casino was a carved wooden figure of a Western character, such as a
miner holding a pan of gold. Made by sculptor Frank Polk, these
characters had chests designed for a Pace or Mills slot machine. Polk
made only 92 of these unique pieces, making them one of the most
collectible slot machines around.
By the 1960s, slot machines were legal only in Nevada. In 1978, New
Jersey became the second state to allow the machines when their
legislature legalized usage in Atlantic City. In 1988, an Act of
Congress made slot machines available for use in American Indian
casinos, which now operate in 28 states.
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