slot machine, gambling device operated by dropping one or more coins or tokens into a
slot and pulling a handle 🔔 or pushing a button to activate one to three or more reels
marked into horizontal segments by varying symbols. The 🔔 machine pays off by dropping
into a cup or trough from two to all the coins in the machine, depending 🔔 on how and how
many of the symbols line up when the rotating reels come to rest. Symbols traditionally
used 🔔 include stars, card suits, bars, numbers (7 is a favourite), various pictured
fruits—cherries, plums, oranges, lemons, and watermelons—and the words 🔔 jackpot and
bar.
The term slot machine (short for nickel-in-the-slot machine) was originally also
used for automatic vending machines but in 🔔 the 20th century came to refer almost
exclusively to gambling devices. The first coin-operated gambling devices in the United
States 🔔 date to the 1880s, although they were actually mere novelties—such as two toy
horses that would race after a coin 🔔 was inserted in the machine—rather than direct
gambling machines. Set on a bar in a saloon or similar establishment, such 🔔 devices
attracted wagering between patrons. With most machines, however, the proprietor paid
off winning customers in drinks or cigars or 🔔 sometimes in the form of trade checks
(specially minted metal tokens) that could be exchanged for refreshments. By 1888
machines 🔔 that paid off in coins were in existence. In the first ones, inserted coins
fell onto an internal balance scale, 🔔 where they might cause it to tip and spill other
coins out; among later devices were ones with a circular 🔔 display and a spinning
indicator that came to rest on or pointed to a number, a colour, or a picture.
The
🔔 first slot machines in the modern sense were invented by Bavarian-born American
inventor Charles August Fey, at the time a 🔔 mechanic in San Francisco, who built his
first coin-operated gambling machine in 1894. The following year Fey built the 4-11-44
🔔 in his basement; it proved so successful at a local saloon that he soon quit his job
and opened a 🔔 factory to produce more units. In 1898 Fey built the Card Bell, the first
three-reel slot machine with automatic cash 🔔 payouts. The Card Bell had a handle that
set the reels in motion when it was pushed down and playing 🔔 card suitmarks that lined
up to form poker hands. His next slot machine, the Liberty Bell, was built in 1899 🔔 and
used horseshoes and bells as well as playing card suitmarks on the reels. Three bells
lined up in a 🔔 row meant the top payout. Chiefly because of the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake, only 4 of more than 100 Liberty 🔔 Bell machines built by Fey survive. The
Liberty Bell proved immensely popular among saloon patrons in San Francisco and was
🔔 quickly copied by Fey’s competitors, such as the Mills Novelty Company of
Chicago.
Forces of morality and the clergy, and then 🔔 of law, frequently opposed the
operation of slot machines. By the time San Francisco banned them in 1909, there were
🔔 some 3,300 slot machines in the city. In order to circumvent the law, Fey and his
competitors built machines with 🔔 no coin slots in which purchase and payout (perhaps in
drinks and cigars) occurred surreptitiously across a saloon counter. Soon 🔔 most
slot-machine factories relocated, especially to Chicago.
The ubiquitous reel symbols of
various fruits were first used in 1909 by the 🔔 Industry Novelty Company. In an effort to
circumvent legal restrictions on slot machines, the company called its machines chewing
gum 🔔 dispensers, replaced suitmarks on the reels with fruit symbols that suggested
various flavours of chewing gum, and built a few 🔔 machines that really did dispense gum.
The idea was copied in the following year by the Mills Novelty Company, which 🔔 added on
their reels a picture of a chewing gum pack (soon stylized as the well-known “bar”
symbol). The Mills 🔔 Novelty Company also invented the “jackpot” in 1916, whereby certain
combinations of symbols on the reels regurgitated all the coins 🔔 in the machine.
During
the 1920s the machines were popular throughout much of the United States, especially in
resort areas, and 🔔 they continued to be popular into the Great Depression years of the
’30s. But knowledge that the distribution of slot 🔔 machines was often controlled by
organized crime led to increasing legislation restricting their sale and transportation
as well as their 🔔 use except in private social clubs. Prohibition outside Nevada, which
had relegalized gambling in 1931, was virtually total by 1951, 🔔 although illegal
operation, especially in private clubs, was widely ignored.
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After World War II the
machines came into worldwide use as governments were drawn by the prospect of tax
🔔 revenue. (In 1988 slot machines were permitted in French casinos, ending a 50-year
ban.) In the 1950s electromechanical slot machines 🔔 allowed many new payout schemes,
such as 3- and 5-coin multipliers, where the sizes of the payouts are proportional to
🔔 the number of coins inserted before the handle is pulled. Video slot machines, which
simulate reels on a monitor, were 🔔 introduced in Las Vegas in 1975. Such machines have
had limited success; for the slot-machine addict, the action of pulling 🔔 the handle, the
sound of the reels falling into line, and most of all the jangle of cascading coins are
🔔 essential parts of the attraction. In 1986 electronic systems were introduced to link
numerous slot machines in different locations and 🔔 thereby allow a fraction of each
inserted coin to go into a shared “super jackpot,” which may reach an extremely 🔔 large
size before it is won; for example, in 2003 a Las Vegas slot machine paid out
nearlyR$40 million.
Modern slot 🔔 machines contain solid-state electronics that can be
set for any desired frequency of payouts. Thus, the house advantage varies widely
🔔 between about 1 and 50 percent depending on circumstances, such as legal requirements
and competition from other casinos. Slot machines 🔔 are by far the largest profit
generator for nearly every casino, averaging 30 to 50 percent or even more of 🔔 total
revenue. Nevada alone has roughly 200,000 slot machines.
As gambling laws were relaxed
at the end of the 20th century 🔔 to allow legal gambling on Native American reservations
and to expand the revenue-generating options of many U.S. states, the number 🔔 of
electronic gaming machines (which came to include video poker machines as well as
modern slot machines) grew significantly. By 🔔 the end of the first decade of the 21st
century, more than 830,000 electronic gaming machines were operating in the 🔔 United
States, and the capital generated from these devices rose from 40 percent of total
casino revenues in 1970 to 🔔 approximately 70 percent in 2010.
In the early 21st century,
casino operators feared that the popularity of physical slot machines in
🔔 brick-and-mortar casinos would be threatened by the sudden rise of online casinos, in
which customers deposited money to make wagers 🔔 and played various games of chance using
personal computers. Competition from online sites, however, had been intermittent since
the advent 🔔 of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which prohibited
U.S. banks and financial institutions from doing business with 🔔 online gambling
companies. While physical slot machines had been legal only in state-sanctioned
casinos, by 2013 some local governments within 🔔 the state of Illinois had allowed bars
and restaurants within their jurisdictions to offer slot machines and other electronic
gaming 🔔 machines to their patrons.
