The History of Slot Machines: From Brooklyn to Las Vegas

The slot machine has no single inventor and no single birthday. In 1891 the Brooklyn firm of Sittman and Pitt began marketing a five-drum card machine that became the first nationally popular automatic gambling machine in the United States, according to a 1981 history in Coin Slot Location. Its prizes still came from the operator. The step that put the payout inside the box is credited to Charles August Fey, a Bavarian-born mechanic in San Francisco, whose three-reel Liberty Bell is dated anywhere from the late 1880s to 1899, depending on the source. San Francisco banned slot machines in 1909, manufacturers answered with gum-vending disguises and fruit symbols, and by the 1960s Nevada was the only place where the machines could operate openly. Bally’s Money Honey then added an electrically controlled hopper, and in the mid-1970s the first video slot moved the reels onto a screen. This article follows that line from Brooklyn to Las Vegas, and flags where historians disagree.

From Poker Drums to Automatic Payouts

Encyclopaedia Britannica dates the first coin-operated gambling devices in the United States to the 1880s and describes them as novelties, such as two toy horses that raced after a coin went in. Winners were usually paid by the proprietor in drinks, cigars or trade checks, which were metal tokens redeemable for refreshments. The Coin Slot Location history names a New York machine patented in 1877, the Guessing Bank, as the oldest known coin machine made for gambling.

The Brooklyn firm of Sittman and Pitt found the formula that sold. In 1891 it began marketing the Little Model Card Machine, with five drums in a row and ten playing cards on each, a total of 50, two short of a full deck. A coin let the player work a lever, the drums spun, and the machine showed a poker hand. The same history says it stayed in production until 1910. Machines of this kind had no automatic payout: a chart listed the goods or cash the operator would give for certain hands, so collectors classify them as trade stimulators.

Others were working on automatic payouts. The Coin Slot Location history credits the John Lighton Machine Company of Syracuse with a mechanically controlled payout in 1892, and biographers Tony Wohlers and Eric Schmaltz report that Gustav Schultze of San Francisco won a patent in 1893 for a Horseshoe machine, the first U.S. patent for a gambling machine. San Francisco was the center of the coin-machine trade. The SFO Museum notes that more than 3,000 machines operated in the city at the start of the twentieth century, and it quotes the San Francisco Call of February 2, 1896: “They are located in nearly all the saloons and cigar-stores in the City”.

Charles Fey and the Liberty Bell

Charles August Fey was born on February 2, 1862, in Vöhringen, Bavaria, the youngest of fifteen children, and arrived in the United States in 1885, according to Wohlers and Schmaltz. He settled in San Francisco as a machinist and instrument maker, and the 1888 city directory lists him at the California Electric Works. There he met Theodor Holtz and Schultze, whose automatic Horseshoe machine inspired his own version in 1894, the year Fey and Holtz founded a workshop.

The biographers date Fey’s breakthrough to 1895, when he finished a machine called the 4-11-44 in the basement of his Berkeley home. It paid coins rather than trade checks, up to five dollars, and the name came from a number sequence in the lottery game policy. A saloon trial went well enough that Fey left his partnership in 1896 to start Charles Fey and Company, and in 1897 he moved to the third floor of 406 Market Street. California State Parks records that he made Liberty Bell gaming devices there from 1897 until the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the workshop.

The three-reel design arrived in the late 1890s. Wohlers and Schmaltz describe a Card Bell of 1898, with staggered reel stops and an automatic payout, and a Liberty Bell of 1899 that replaced some card suit marks with stars and bells. Each reel carried ten symbols, which allowed 1,000 combinations, and three bells paid fifty cents. Because California’s anti-gambling laws kept him from obtaining a patent, they write, Fey did not sell his machines. He placed them in saloons and split the take with the owners.

Turning Points: Fire, Bans and Gum

Three events then changed the industry. The first was copying. Wohlers and Schmaltz relay a story from Fey’s son Edmund that a San Francisco saloon was burglarized in 1905 and only a bartender’s apron and a Liberty Bell were taken, and that two years later the Chicago firm of Herbert Mills put a virtually identical machine on sale. The Mills Liberty Bell appeared in 1907, and rivals in Detroit and Chicago soon built bell machines of their own.

The second was the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906, which destroyed Fey’s factory. According to the same biography, he put up a temporary tin-shack factory and was back in business within four months. The third was the law. The SFO Museum says social reformers targeted the machines as a destructive influence on families, and civic leaders posed before heaps of smashed ones. In the summer of 1909 San Francisco passed an ordinance outlawing slot machines altogether, ending, by Wohlers and Schmaltz’s count, the operation of about 3,200 of them.

Makers looked for loopholes, the SFO Museum says, building trade stimulators that paid vouchers, vending devices that dispensed mints or gum, and machines labeled for amusement only. Fruit symbols came out of this disguise. Britannica credits the Industry Novelty Company in 1909 with calling its machines chewing gum dispensers and replacing suit marks with fruit that suggested gum flavors, followed in 1910 by Mills, which added a picture of a gum pack that became the bar symbol. Wohlers and Schmaltz report that Governor Hiram Johnson then signed a statewide ban in 1911, and Fey moved to Chicago, which replaced San Francisco as the industry’s capital.

Aftermath: Nevada, Money Honey and the Screen

Outside Nevada, which relegalized gambling in 1931 according to Britannica, the machines were pushed out. The SFO Museum notes that Congress barred shipment of slot machines across state lines in 1951, that state legislators passed possession bans in every state but one, and that by the 1960s the machines were legal only in Nevada. Even in Nevada slots were an afterthought. Historian Cristina Turdean writes that a 1950s machine was a nickel-plated box whose clock mechanism had hundreds of moving parts, vulnerable to cheating and breakdown, and Michael LaPointe adds in The Paris Review that slots sat at the periphery of the casino floor.

Bally changed that. Bally’s buyout closed on June 17, 1963, and a company history places the debut of the Money Honey in November 1963. It was a three-reel electromechanical machine with a motor-driven hopper that paid without an attendant. Turdean reports that by 1967 Bally claimed 94 percent of the machines sold in Nevada, and LaPointe notes that in 1981 slots out-earned table games at Las Vegas casinos.

The screen came next. Turdean records that James Saxton filed a patent for a random-number-controlled machine in 1975, and that William Redd bought the Fortune Coin Company in 1978, whose engineers had built a machine that displayed colored fruit symbols electronically. Inge Telnaes’s virtual-reel patent, filed in 1982 and issued in 1984, let software add symbols beyond those on the physical reels.

Legends, Disputes and the Other Side

The question of who invented the slot machine has no clean answer. Marshall Fey, the inventor’s grandson, writes that Charles Fey built his three-reel slot in the late 1880s. California State Parks dates it to 1895, Britannica gives 1899 for the Liberty Bell, the SFO Museum 1898 and the Nevada State Museum 1899. Sittman and Pitt’s machine, by contrast, is dated 1891 across the sources read, but it paid nothing on its own.

Other details are contested. Britannica gives about 3,300 San Francisco machines at the time of the ban, Wohlers and Schmaltz about 3,200. Britannica credits Industry Novelty with fruit symbols in 1909, while Marshall Fey dates Mills’s gum machine to 1910. Money Honey is dated both ways. The Paris Review and a company history say 1963, while the Las Vegas Advisor and a collectors’ guide say 1964; they also differ on its hopper, put at 500 coins by the company history and 2,500 by the Review.

Video slots carry a similar dispute. Britannica says they were introduced in Las Vegas in 1975, while Casino City Times dates Fortune Coin’s machine to 1976. A popular account adds a trial at the Las Vegas Hilton and approval by the Nevada Gaming Commission after anti-cheating changes. WagerPast could not confirm that sequence in an official record or scholarly source, so it is left as unverified. The other side of the ledger matters as well: an 1890s San Francisco press headline warned of “Fifteen Hundred Swindling Machines in One City”, and cheating shaped the machines’ later design, Turdean writes.

Slot Machine Timeline

Related Stories

The slot machine sits inside a longer story of chance and casinos, and WagerPast follows several threads of it. Casino games gained their modern shape long before the slot, as told in the history of roulette, which traces the wheel from Paris salons to Monte Carlo. The urge to leave outcomes to luck runs back to the history of dice and to the history of lotteries, and the casino floor changed again when a mathematician turned his attention to blackjack, as covered in the story of Edward O. Thorp. Together these articles show how games, and the rules around them, changed over the centuries.

Sources & References

• Coin Slot Location (Autumn 1981) — Playing cards (history of early card and payout machines)
• Tony Wohlers and Eric Schmaltz — Charles August Fey, Immigrant Entrepreneurship (2018)
• California State Parks, Office of Historic Preservation — Site of Invention of the Three-Reel Bell Slot Machine, Historical Landmark 937
• SFO Museum — Games of Chance: Gambling Devices of the Mechanical Age (2016-2017)
• SFO Museum — Games of Chance gallery: Liberty Bell, 1898
• Dan Glimne and the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica — Slot machine
• Marshall Fey — Cherry, Cherry, Cherry, Cabinet magazine, issue 19
• Nevada State Museum — Newsletter, February 2007 (The Fey Collection)
• Irving Kaye — Bally Manufacturing Corporation (company history)
• Michael LaPointe — The Edison of the Slot Machines, The Paris Review (2020)
• Las Vegas Advisor — Question of the Day (July 11, 2014)
• California Antique Slots — Bally machine descriptions
• Cristina Turdean — Computerizing Chance: The Digitization of the Slot Machine (1960-1985), UNLV Center for Gaming Research (2012)
• John Robison — When did computers take over the slot floor?, Casino City Times (2011)
• Las Vegas Advisor — Where did the slot machine bar symbol come from? (2023)