History of the Slot Machine

Usually it is very hard to track the origins of popular gambling games, due to their antiquity. However, slot machines are relative newcomers to the centuries old gambling world, so tracking their history is not difficult.

A car mechanic from San Francisco named Charles Fey was the first person to create a fully functional slots machine, which he called the Liberty Bell. Instead of the fruit symbols commonly attributed to slot machines today, the Liberty Bell featured playing card symbols like diamonds and clubs, stars, and horseshoes. Later Fey created the Operator Bell Slot machine, this one with the now famous fruit symbols that would later become the aesthetic standard for slot machine designs.

The Bell-Fruit Gum Company stole Charles Fey's original concept of money slot machines and created a slot machine lookalike that dispensed bubble gum. Have you ever wondered where the "BAR" symbol that is so common in slot machines comes from? You can thank the Bell-Fruit Gum Company, as it was the name of their gum.

Fey could not keep up with the demands for his slot machines with only his small shop, so he teamed up with the Mills Novelty Company to produce the first nation-wide commercial slots machine, the Liberty Mills Bell.

The gambling industry expanded quickly thanks to the success of Fey's slot machine. Decades later, in the 1940's, the city of Las Vegas in Nevada, particularly the resort known as 'the Strip', began to grow into the gambling site it is known as today.

With the advent of the microchip in the late 1960's, electric slot machines started replacing the traditional mechanical beasts. This was a significant improvement, which allowed new machines to be manufactured more easily and faster.

Since Charles Fey originally invented the first functioning slot machine in 1895, slots have evolved from huge mechanic machines made of heavy metal, into lighter and more colorful electric machines, and finally into online slot machines that are played in online casinos. This long process of evolution ocurred over the last hundred years, and the present 21st century will be the era of Internet gambling with online casino slots.

While it will never be the exact same experience, the online gambling industry has done a great job of transferring the thrill of gambling and the feeling of the games into virtual form. The mechanics and odds are exactly the same, by use of complex random number generators and good looking and easy to use graphical user interfaces.