For many, slot machines are only familiar from American movies or run-down restaurants, but this is a multi-billion-dollar business with serious roots and an exciting history.
The incredible triumph of slot machines began in the late 1800s. The first slot machine was invented by Charles Fey (1862 – 1944), who was a skilled handyman, who knew both electronics and mechanics. In 1894, he created the so-called “Liberty Bell Slot Machine”. Charles previously worked for the electrical engineering company, then founded his own company with Theodore Holtz and Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Schultze, which initially dealt with electrical equipment and telephones.
The first slot machines operated with tickets and chips, which required an operator. Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Schultze, later created the “Horseshoe Slot Machine”, which was the first slot machine equipped with an automatic payout mechanism. The slot machines then became fully autonomous machines, in which many people saw the business potential, and the incredible triumph of online slot machines started from here. Charles Fey developed this machine called “Horseshoe” further, when in 1895, his slot machine was born that already worked with coins and issued the prizes in coins. This brought an incredible breakthrough in a short time and gained amazing popularity. Charles then opened a slot machine workshop and developed all kinds of slot machine mechanisms. The “Liberty Bell Slot Machine” was born in 1898 in San Francisco, this is the origin of slot machines, it is often referred to as the first slot machine. Everything started from here, the entire genre of slot machines, the descendants of which are today’s modern software online slots.
The Liberty Bell slot machine had 3 reels, and when three adjacent Liberty Bell symbols landed on the reels, the machine awarded the 50-cent jackpot prize. Charles operated his slot machines in various locations in San Francisco. Since gambling was prohibited in the state of California, Charles was unfortunately unable to protect the patent for his slot machine at the time, which principle then spread like wildfire, and more and more competing machines appeared, and more and more people started creating slot machines. It must have been dramatic enough for Charles Fey to not enjoy the patent fruits of his creation.
These ancient slot machines still worked on a mechanical basis, that is, the machine worked with the help of moving parts, the player pulled the lever and could already hear the machine’s metallic rumbling and clicking, and people were completely enchanted by its tinkling sound. By pulling the lever, the power was transferred to the internal mechanics of the structure, which spun the reels, and a motor spun them in a timed manner, then stopped them one by one, and also issued the prize if a winning combination of symbols was created. The success of the slot machines was overwhelming, the same principle lives on in the slot machines of today’s online casinos, where a software performs the entire tasks of the previously mechanical machine. Online slots are not limited by mechanical constraints. The only limit to the development of online slot machines is imagination.
We are now turning the pages in the big book of slot machines, from which you can find out everything that can be important about these machines.