Have you ever wondered where all the many nicknames for slot machines come from? Ever wondered why slot machines have the sound of bells ringing when you win, or why one of the symbols reads BAR? Read here about the history of slot machines and find out!

Liberty Bell the One-Armed Bandit

The Californian Charles Fey invented a slot machine in 1887 with automatic payout. He called it Liberty Bell because the three reels held 5 symbols, diamond, hearts, spades, horseshoes and a liberty bell, where three bells in a row earned the biggest payout. The game was originally operated by a lever on the side, which is why slot machines were called one-armed bandits: with just one arm they could rob a player of their money.

Poker Machine

In Brooklyn, 1891, Sittman and Pitt invented a slot machine with 5 drums and 50 poker card faces (the 10 of spades and jack of hearts were omitted to give the house a bigger edge). The objective was to get a good poker hand, but with so many symbols and combinations the game was too complicated for the machine to make automatic payouts. An attendant would make the payouts, and these weren’t always paid in money. Depending on what the establishment had on offer, a player could also be rewarded with cigarettes or drinks.

Fruit Machines

In some states gambling was illegal, so in order to get round this prohibition, some machines displayed fruit as symbols on the reels which would correspond to the flavours of gum a player was payed out in. This did not always work, however, since in some cases courts ruled against these machines because the attraction to the player was still taking the gamble that they might get more candy or candy tokens out of it than the money they put in would otherwise buy them.

On To Modern Slots

In 1963 Bally Technologies invented the first fully electromechanical slot machine. It was called Money Honey. In 1984 Inge Telnaes patented the use of random number generators to determine the positions in which a reel stops. This allows machines which accept small amounts of money to offer huge jackpots, because the odds of the jackpot being won are small enough to keep the machine profitable to its owner. This provided the basis for slots and video slots as we know them today.