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Who invented the first auto-pay slot machine?

Gustav Schultze
Herbert Mills
Charles Fey
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LATEST ANTIQUES ARTICLE______________________________

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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