History Of Slots
See also
Playing slot machines is the most popular form of gambling in the casino. Sometimes they are called fruit machines, because of the symbols which determine wins; sometimes one-armed bandits, because of the single handle to rob gamblers and their poor odds. Either way, they are forms of mechanical lotteries.
The slot machine model that future slot machines would be based upon was invented in 1887 by Charles Fey in San Francisco.
The metal box, which he named The Liberty Bell, stood on cast-iron feet and displayed three metal reels through a window. The first machines took a nickel to play and displayed ten different symbols, including horseshoes, spades, diamonds, hearts, and bells, creating 1,000 possible combinations.You won a whopping jackpot of ten nickels if you lined up three Liberty Bells. The total payout for all winning combinations was 750 coins. This gave the house a 25 percent profit.
In later years, slots were disguised as vending machines because gambling was illegal. Bars with chewing gum logos were pictured on the reels, and the players would get a stick of gum or mints with their spin.
Over the years since Fey's first Liberty Bell, down to the 1980s, the machines did not change much in basic appearance. Although their facades contained many variations, they all had the spinning reels.
The Era of Bally's. Bally's was the worldwide innovator. It moved machines from being mere mechanical devices activated by pulling a handle to being electromechanical devices. The handle pull was now just an alternative way to push a button to make the machine run. Bally's first machine was the Money Honey, which contained a much larger capacity to store coins, making bigger payoffs more possible. In 1964, Bally's developed a progressive machine, which permitted a jackpot amount to grow each time the player made a losing play. The possibility of winning thousands of dollars on machine play was opened up. Also, the machines could accumulate jackpots large enough that the expected payoff return for a player could become positive (over 100 percent).
Modern day reel-type slot machines have a number of spaces on each reel that contain a symbol or blank. These are referred to as the physical stops. Most of the old mechanical machines had reels that could hold twenty symbols while the modern slots have reels with twenty-two physical stops, but hundreds of virtual stops.
In 1984, Inge Telnaes received a patent for his device titled, "Electronic Gaming Device Utilizing a Random Number Generator for Selecting the Reel Stop Positions." This device allowed for the creation of what we call the virtual reel. Microprocessing technology allowed the new machines to accommodate a large number of "virtual stops," which can number 256 or more. Each virtual stop was linked to one of the twenty-two physical stops on the reel.
In recent years, the slot makers introduced newer video slot machines, which are different from the slots with physical reels. With this technology and design, machines are not confined to having only twenty-two physical stops on each reel. The game designers can incorporate any number of video symbols on each reel, increasing the total number of combinations possible. This is the reason the video slots can offer such large jackpots.
Although all the machines offer gambling games, with their variety has come a variety of rules, making the machines much more sophisticated than the ones that just asked the player to pull a handle - or decide how many coins to play and then pull a handle.
