From the Liberty Bell to video reels: a short history of the slot

9 minute read

In 1891 a Brooklyn company, Sittman and Pitt, built a coin-operated machine with five drums of playing cards. Players hoped for a good poker hand, and prizes were drinks or cigars handed over by the bar. There was no automatic payout: the combinations were too many to pay mechanically.

Charles Fey's three reels

A few years later Charles Fey, a mechanic in San Francisco, simplified the idea. His machine had three reels and five symbols: horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts and a cracked Liberty Bell. With so few combinations it could pay out by itself. Three bells paid the top prize, and the Liberty Bell gave the machine its name.

Fruit, gum and the word jackpot

When gambling machines were restricted in parts of the United States, makers swapped prizes for chewing gum, and cherries, lemons and plums appeared on the reels as flavours. The bar symbol is said to come from the Bell-Fruit Gum Company's logo. The fruit stayed long after the gum went.

Electricity, then screens

In the 1960s, electromechanical machines added motors and hoppers that could pay large prizes automatically. In the 1970s the first video slots replaced physical reels with a screen. By the 1980s a computer chip decided every result, and the reels on screen simply showed it.

Online and on your phone

The first online slots arrived in the mid-1990s. Today's games add bonus rounds, cascading reels, thousands of ways to win and stories that run across a whole session. Underneath, the idea is the same as Fey's: spin, stop, and see what lines up.