Jack Kelly writer
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THE SLOTS: A HISTORY OF ONE-ARMED BANDITS
(Invention & Technology, Fall 2000)
How do you get a person to feed money into a device that
serves no function but to give only some of it back? Slot-
machine designers have always had an intuitive grasp of the
arts of both P. T. Barnum and B. F. Skinner, mixing two parts
sucker appeal with one part operant conditioning. Their
devices have been caressed and kicked, prayed to,
execrated, and suspected of malign intelligence. They have
soaked up billions in profits and attracted a century of legal
suppression. But hate them as we may, we can’t stop playing
them.
After 1870 the cash register, typewriter, adding machine, and
telephone began to make their impact on daily life. Why
couldn’t machines likewise bring convenience and efficiency
to gambling? In 1877 Edward J. McLoughlin patented an
“Improvement in Toy Money-Boxes.” A customer chose a
number and inserted a coin, then spun a pointer on the small
countertop device. An attendant—the bartender or store
owner—paid the winner. Other gambling inventions hit the
market in succeeding years: the “Eureka Box,” the “Investor,”
the “Perhaps,” the 3-for-l Slot Machine. They let players spin
a disk or drop coins down through an obstacle course of
pegs. Usually, the machines enjoyed a craze, then fell into
obscurity.
In San Francisco, where a robust tradition of gambling
survived from gold-rush days, the possibilities of mechanizing
luck enticed a number of inventors, mostly German
immigrants. In 1893 a machinist there named Gustav F. W.
Schultze invented a countertop device that accepted a nickel
and spun a color-wheel disk. When the disk stopped, a notch
in a star wheel on the same spindle determined the payout, if
any. Schultze constructed a slide to cut the right number of
coins from a stack and let them fall into a cup where the
player could retrieve them. This automatic payout freed the
attendant, beguiled the player, and launched an industry.
The late 1890s ushered in wave after wave of increasingly
elaborate slot machines more or less patterned on Schultze’
s, and after he lost a patent- infringement case, the
shameless pirating of rivals’ ideas became an industry
tradition. The machines grew into freestanding consoles,
their spinning colored wheels standard fixtures in saloons.
Most were driven by a clockwork of springs, cams, and
levers. A few used batteries to operate solenoids that
controlled the payout, but these proved unreliable. Electricity
would not re-enter slot-machine technology for decades.
A colleague of Schultze, the Bavarian-born San Franciscan
Charles Fey, became the Thomas Edison of slots. During the
1890s Fey was building automatic-payout wheel machines
like others on the market when he added the innovation of
having three wheels instead of one. Sometime around the
turn of the century he changed the orientation of the disks,
turning them into reels that flashed symbols of playing cards
past a window. He called the device the “Card Bell.” If the
reels stopped on a winning combination, the machine would
automatically pay between 2 and 20 coins.
Fey rigged his reels to stop in sequence, first one, then
another, then the last, drawing out the moment of decision.
Players loved the brief suspense. The three reels, each with
10 symbols, yielded 1,000 possible combinations (10 times
10 times 10), many more than were available on wheel
machines. The greater number of potential prizes excited
customers and not incidentally made it impossible to easily
calculate the odds of winning. Soon afterward Fey
constructed a similar machine, the “Liberty Bell,” substituting
simple symbols—hearts, diamonds, horseshoes—for the
playing cards. Bell would afterward serve as a generic term
for the standard three-reel-based devices that became the
archetype of the slot machine.
Fey’s creation performed several tasks simultaneously.
When a player inserted a nickel and pulled the handle, the
machine detected the coin, spun the reels, and selected their
resting place at random, using arms that clicked into the
notches of star wheels. Mechanical fingers sensed the reels’
positions and used slides like Schultze’s to eject the proper
number of coins (the random combination of symbols
resulted in a payout of 75.6 percent of the money played). A
spring-driven clock coordinated the multiple functions. The
machine then automatically reset itself for the next pull. Many
variations on the slot machine came and went over the years,
but the bell machine, incorporating Fey’s basic mechanism,
dominated the market for more than half a century.
The man who turned Fey’s invention into a gold mine was
Herbert S. Mills. Mills was the son of a maker of railroad
crossing gates with a sideline in coin machines. When he
took over the family firm in 1897, he changed the name to
Mills Novelty Company and focused on slots. By 1910 Mills
Novelty was the industry giant, with an eight-story
manufacturing plant in Chicago.
The “Owl,” which Mills began selling in 1898, grabbed a solid
portion of the market for the then-popular freestanding
machines, wheel games housed in ornate oak cabinets with
nickel-plated trim. “If it stops on a winning number,” the San
Francisco Morning Call reported that year, “the machine,
actuated by some hidden mechanism, which is almost human
in its intelligence, performs the operation technically known in
the argot of the saloons as ‘coughing it up.’”
Mills pushed slots into new territories by lowering prices and
increasing reliability. The company replaced cast-iron parts
with stamped steel for greater durability and more rapid
production. Much of the evolution of the technology, though,
was aimed at subterfuge. The legal waters were murky from
the beginning. The machines made a highly visible target,
and they suffered a particular stigma because they
democratized gambling; anyone with a nickel could play, no
skill required. The lower classes, in the view of reformers,
needed to be protected from themselves. As early as 1893
demands arose to suppress nickel-in-the-slot machines as
illegal lotteries. The big floor models, which could take up to
three dollars on each pull of the handle, sparked periodic
crackdowns. Some states banned them across the board.
For years manufacturers, operators, politicians, and police
engaged in complicated chess games over the letter of the
law, with the issue often decided by a strategic bribe.
One of the most popular ways to maintain a toehold in
legality became the sale of a pack of gum with each pull of
the handle. In theory the candy dispenser took the machine
out of the realm of pure gambling device, though many
players passed up the gum.
In 1906 Mills Novelty issued its own “Liberty Bell,” an
improvement on Fey’s machine. Three years later the
company introduced the “Liberty Bell Gum Fruit,” which, to
dilute the association with gambling, changed the symbols on
the reels to images of fruits, the flavors of gum available. Mills’
s “Operators Bell” did not sell gum but established the fruit
symbols—lemon, orange, plum, and cherry—as the industry
standard. The biggest prize came when three Bell Fruit Gum
labels were lined up. These would evolve into the three bars
that traditionally signified a jackpot.
The Mills machines expanded the reels to 20 symbols apiece.
Designers lengthened the window covering the reels so the
player could see three lines of symbols. The resulting near-
miss factor enticed customers to keep playing and became a
feature of all slots.
Now the machines spread to places like cigar stands,
restaurants, drugstores, and soda fountains. “Practically
every corner in the more popular business sections of this
city is decorated with a slot machine,” a San Francisco paper
noted in 1909. But as their use expanded, the battle over
their legality heated up.
The manufacturers fought back by turning the machines into
“trade stimulators.” They eliminated the coin payout and
substituted tokens theoretically redeemable for
merchandise—a drink or a free cigar—but often used as
cash equivalents. The side-mounted gum dispenser was
replaced by a mint-vending device, which was built into the
front, further camouflaging the gambling function for
“marginal” territories. Slots were designed to “sell” everything
from golf balls to pencils to cigarettes and were disguised as
music boxes, beer barrels, strength testers, clocks, and
radios. The payout was designated “profit sharing” rather
than a prize. “Skill” elements were added, such as buttons
that let the player try to stop the reel on a particular symbol.
The machines were miniaturized so that a proprietor could
whip them off the counter at the first sight of the law.
Around 1917 Mills and another leading manufacturer,
Watling, each offered an “O.K. Operators Bell,” a machine
supposed to be okay with the law in all territories, no matter
how tight the local regulations. It could sell gum, pay in trade
checks, or tell fortunes. It employed “future pay,” dropping
the player’s winnings into an inaccessible receptacle to be
released only on the next pull of the handle. Since the player
always knew exactly what he would get back, he was
obviously not gambling. Reform-minded legislators were left
scratching their heads.
By 1920 alcohol had fallen victim to these same reformers’
wrath, threatening the slots’ most popular locations. But the
operators of speakeasies lost little sleep over the fine points
of gambling laws. As illicit watering holes proliferated, slot
sales burgeoned.
The slots were a natural during the go-for-broke twenties.
Many nickel machines were revamped to take quarters and
half-dollars, and the first silver-dollar bell machine appeared
in 1929. The decade also brought a pivotal innovation in the
machines’ technology, the jackpot. The idea went back to the
simple machines of the 1890s and had been tried from time
to time since. The coins accumulated behind glass, providing
tantalizing bait for players. When the three bars came up, the
machines spilled out a thrilling little bonanza in addition to the
traditional 20-coin prize. By the time of the stock market
crash, machines that didn’t offer jackpots were obsolete.
Struggling merchants, who split the machines’ take with their
distributors, often found the extra $25 or $50 a week a
means of staying solvent. “It’s the greatest instrument of
optimism that was ever developed,” Mills boasted of one of its
1933 machines, “… full of promise, fascination, hope, and
LIFE.”
During Prohibition, though, the public had begun to associate
slots with the underworld. They came to be seen as a racket
controlled by a sinister syndicate. In a 1932 Fortune
magazine profile of Mills Novelty titled “Plums, Cherries, and
Murder,” the editors warned that “big-time racketeers are
pressing more and more eagerly into this rich territory.”
All those nickels did attract criminals. In the early 1930s, the
mobster Frank Costello controlled more than 7,000 of the
estimated 25,000 slots in New York City. Government’s
answer was to pass even more draconian laws and to use
slot machines as photo opportunities for sledgehammer-
wielding politicians. Earl Warren, future Chief Justice of the
United States, built his reputation on his implacable
opposition to California’s slot machines; in New York, Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia, with the press in tow, floated a barge full
of slots into Long Island Sound in October 1934 and
consigned more than 1,000 of them to the deep.
World War II put the industry on hold as manufacturers
turned their machining skills to armament production. The
subsequent peace and prosperity brought a resurgence of
slots, but as Marshall Fey points out in his historical survey
Slot Machines, they “continued to operate in the twilight zone
of the law.” Then the ax fell.
Up until mid-century, states and municipalities had fought a
losing war against slots. Manufacturers had sold them openly
as local officials struggled to curb them. The Johnson Act,
signed by President Truman in 1951, attacked the machines
at their source, prohibiting their interstate shipment except to
locations where they were strictly legal, which meant only
Nevada, part of Idaho, and a few counties in Maryland. For
the slot-machine industry it was a staggering blow.
But hardly a knockout. Postwar America was a mobile
society; if the slots couldn’t come to the players, the players
would travel to the slots. Nevada had offered legal gambling
for twenty years. Harold’s Club in Reno became one of the
first casinos to aggressively promote its slot machines. By the
1950s the club had boosted the payout to 88 percent and
offered bigger jackpots; players responded by feeding the
machines for hours on end. Casino operators began to love
the slots’ predictable returns and low labor costs, and the
machines began to evolve to suit the casinos’ needs. They
grew flashier, with lighted cases and lurid graphics. They
became front-opening so they could be packed together
more closely and serviced with ease.
By the early 1960s the mechanical bell device, so long the
definitive design, had had its day. Some firms had been
offering electric-motor-driven slots as early as 1930, but
players had long resisted innovation; they liked the feel of
the traditional mechanisms. In 1963 the Bally Manufacturing
Company, a producer of pinball and arcade games,
introduced an electric slot machine with the mellifluous name
“Money Honey.” Gone were the slides that had always
controlled the payout. The Money Honey incorporated a
large hopper with an electric coin counter. Electromechanical
sensors let the machine detect more than 50 payout
combinations and disgorge large jackpots.
Slot designers quickly took advantage of the possibilities the
new technology offered. The machines could pay for symbols
on any of the three visible lines or for diagonal match-ups,
giving players many more ways to win. “Multiplier” machines
let the players increase their payouts by inserting more than
one coin, a revival of a concept that had flourished in the
1890s.
Bally came to dominate the market during the sixties as many
of the old-line manufacturers faded away. But at the edges of
the industry, small companies were experimenting with even
more radical changes in technology. The first solid-state
machine, based on motor drives and solenoid stops,
appeared in 1966. In 1975 video versions of the traditional
three-reel slot found a niche as novelty machines in the
market. Little by little these ideas won acceptance from
players.
The 1978 advent of gambling in Atlantic City gave the
industry a boost, and New Jersey regulations encouraged
competition by requiring casinos to purchase no more than
half their slot machines from a single manufacturer. But a
man named William S. (“Si”) Redd did the most to usher in
the modern age of slots. While working as a Bally salesman
and distributor in Nevada, Redd also made and distributed
novelty machines, including Brobdingnagian promotional
slots like “Big Bertha” and several versions of the incipient
video games. When he sold his distributing company to Bally
in 1975, he held on to the novelty portion. It was a prescient
move.
Throughout the seventies, logic cards and integrated circuits
took over from wiring, switches, and relays. At the same time,
casinos grew increasingly dependent on slots. By 1983 the
machines were contributing more than half of all casino
revenues. Casino managers found that higher payouts with
frequent small jackpots would boost their handle, and the
more and more popular dollar machines came to offer as
much as a 97.5 percent return. Truckloads of silver dollars
had to be shipped to Nevada to handle the action.
In 1981 Redd took his company public, changing its name to
International Game Technology. Its line of solid-state slots
put it into a highstakes duel with Bally, a contest in which it
held an ace in the hole. IGT enjoyed a monopoly on video
poker machines, which became the industry sensation of the
decade. The element of skill, combined with frequent wins,
mesmerized players. The devices helped establish IGT as
the leading slot machine manufacturer in the world.
In the mid-eighties IGT adopted an innovation that stood the
basic concept of the slot machine on its head. The spinning
reels had, since Charlie Fey’s “Card Bell,” been the means of
randomly determining the prizes a machine paid out. The IGT
machines used a computer to generate random numbers,
which decided the payout instantaneously. A stepper motor,
informed by an optic sensor, then deliberately stopped the
reels at positions the microprocessor had already chosen.
The technology left the reels as a mere artifact of the
machines’ history.
A 1930s reporter had described slot machines as “cash
registers dressed up for a circus.” Today they are the
apotheosis of glitz. Lights flash. Sound cards generate music
or replicate the sound of long-gone machinery. Video
displays decorate their fronts. They offer themes ranging
from Elvis Presley to “Jeopardy.” The popular “game within a
game” feature gives the player a second and third chance to
win. Multigame video machines offer everything from
blackjack to instant lotteries on one screen.
The handle that always distinguished the “one-armed bandit”
has long since become a vestigial limb; a push of a button is
all that’s needed. The idea of “free play” does away with
coins regularly tumbling into the payout cup; players
accumulate credits and just keep playing. Meanwhile, the
jackpots have grown to gargantuan proportions. Slot
machines linked electronically across an entire region have
resulted in mega jackpots exceeding $27 million, potentially
available to anyone on a single play.
Slot machines in Nevada casinos alone take in close to $6
billion a year. They represent as much as 74 percent of a
gambling operation’s revenues, dwarfing the take from the
traditional table games. Today they are spreading outside
the gambling halls; manufacturers hope the day is not far off
when they will return to bars. As a 1931 Mills flier said, “Who
can resist them?”
# # #
(Invention & Technology, Fall 2000)
How do you get a person to feed money into a device that
serves no function but to give only some of it back? Slot-
machine designers have always had an intuitive grasp of the
arts of both P. T. Barnum and B. F. Skinner, mixing two parts
sucker appeal with one part operant conditioning. Their
devices have been caressed and kicked, prayed to,
execrated, and suspected of malign intelligence. They have
soaked up billions in profits and attracted a century of legal
suppression. But hate them as we may, we can’t stop playing
them.
After 1870 the cash register, typewriter, adding machine, and
telephone began to make their impact on daily life. Why
couldn’t machines likewise bring convenience and efficiency
to gambling? In 1877 Edward J. McLoughlin patented an
“Improvement in Toy Money-Boxes.” A customer chose a
number and inserted a coin, then spun a pointer on the small
countertop device. An attendant—the bartender or store
owner—paid the winner. Other gambling inventions hit the
market in succeeding years: the “Eureka Box,” the “Investor,”
the “Perhaps,” the 3-for-l Slot Machine. They let players spin
a disk or drop coins down through an obstacle course of
pegs. Usually, the machines enjoyed a craze, then fell into
obscurity.
In San Francisco, where a robust tradition of gambling
survived from gold-rush days, the possibilities of mechanizing
luck enticed a number of inventors, mostly German
immigrants. In 1893 a machinist there named Gustav F. W.
Schultze invented a countertop device that accepted a nickel
and spun a color-wheel disk. When the disk stopped, a notch
in a star wheel on the same spindle determined the payout, if
any. Schultze constructed a slide to cut the right number of
coins from a stack and let them fall into a cup where the
player could retrieve them. This automatic payout freed the
attendant, beguiled the player, and launched an industry.
The late 1890s ushered in wave after wave of increasingly
elaborate slot machines more or less patterned on Schultze’
s, and after he lost a patent- infringement case, the
shameless pirating of rivals’ ideas became an industry
tradition. The machines grew into freestanding consoles,
their spinning colored wheels standard fixtures in saloons.
Most were driven by a clockwork of springs, cams, and
levers. A few used batteries to operate solenoids that
controlled the payout, but these proved unreliable. Electricity
would not re-enter slot-machine technology for decades.
A colleague of Schultze, the Bavarian-born San Franciscan
Charles Fey, became the Thomas Edison of slots. During the
1890s Fey was building automatic-payout wheel machines
like others on the market when he added the innovation of
having three wheels instead of one. Sometime around the
turn of the century he changed the orientation of the disks,
turning them into reels that flashed symbols of playing cards
past a window. He called the device the “Card Bell.” If the
reels stopped on a winning combination, the machine would
automatically pay between 2 and 20 coins.
Fey rigged his reels to stop in sequence, first one, then
another, then the last, drawing out the moment of decision.
Players loved the brief suspense. The three reels, each with
10 symbols, yielded 1,000 possible combinations (10 times
10 times 10), many more than were available on wheel
machines. The greater number of potential prizes excited
customers and not incidentally made it impossible to easily
calculate the odds of winning. Soon afterward Fey
constructed a similar machine, the “Liberty Bell,” substituting
simple symbols—hearts, diamonds, horseshoes—for the
playing cards. Bell would afterward serve as a generic term
for the standard three-reel-based devices that became the
archetype of the slot machine.
Fey’s creation performed several tasks simultaneously.
When a player inserted a nickel and pulled the handle, the
machine detected the coin, spun the reels, and selected their
resting place at random, using arms that clicked into the
notches of star wheels. Mechanical fingers sensed the reels’
positions and used slides like Schultze’s to eject the proper
number of coins (the random combination of symbols
resulted in a payout of 75.6 percent of the money played). A
spring-driven clock coordinated the multiple functions. The
machine then automatically reset itself for the next pull. Many
variations on the slot machine came and went over the years,
but the bell machine, incorporating Fey’s basic mechanism,
dominated the market for more than half a century.
The man who turned Fey’s invention into a gold mine was
Herbert S. Mills. Mills was the son of a maker of railroad
crossing gates with a sideline in coin machines. When he
took over the family firm in 1897, he changed the name to
Mills Novelty Company and focused on slots. By 1910 Mills
Novelty was the industry giant, with an eight-story
manufacturing plant in Chicago.
The “Owl,” which Mills began selling in 1898, grabbed a solid
portion of the market for the then-popular freestanding
machines, wheel games housed in ornate oak cabinets with
nickel-plated trim. “If it stops on a winning number,” the San
Francisco Morning Call reported that year, “the machine,
actuated by some hidden mechanism, which is almost human
in its intelligence, performs the operation technically known in
the argot of the saloons as ‘coughing it up.’”
Mills pushed slots into new territories by lowering prices and
increasing reliability. The company replaced cast-iron parts
with stamped steel for greater durability and more rapid
production. Much of the evolution of the technology, though,
was aimed at subterfuge. The legal waters were murky from
the beginning. The machines made a highly visible target,
and they suffered a particular stigma because they
democratized gambling; anyone with a nickel could play, no
skill required. The lower classes, in the view of reformers,
needed to be protected from themselves. As early as 1893
demands arose to suppress nickel-in-the-slot machines as
illegal lotteries. The big floor models, which could take up to
three dollars on each pull of the handle, sparked periodic
crackdowns. Some states banned them across the board.
For years manufacturers, operators, politicians, and police
engaged in complicated chess games over the letter of the
law, with the issue often decided by a strategic bribe.
One of the most popular ways to maintain a toehold in
legality became the sale of a pack of gum with each pull of
the handle. In theory the candy dispenser took the machine
out of the realm of pure gambling device, though many
players passed up the gum.
In 1906 Mills Novelty issued its own “Liberty Bell,” an
improvement on Fey’s machine. Three years later the
company introduced the “Liberty Bell Gum Fruit,” which, to
dilute the association with gambling, changed the symbols on
the reels to images of fruits, the flavors of gum available. Mills’
s “Operators Bell” did not sell gum but established the fruit
symbols—lemon, orange, plum, and cherry—as the industry
standard. The biggest prize came when three Bell Fruit Gum
labels were lined up. These would evolve into the three bars
that traditionally signified a jackpot.
The Mills machines expanded the reels to 20 symbols apiece.
Designers lengthened the window covering the reels so the
player could see three lines of symbols. The resulting near-
miss factor enticed customers to keep playing and became a
feature of all slots.
Now the machines spread to places like cigar stands,
restaurants, drugstores, and soda fountains. “Practically
every corner in the more popular business sections of this
city is decorated with a slot machine,” a San Francisco paper
noted in 1909. But as their use expanded, the battle over
their legality heated up.
The manufacturers fought back by turning the machines into
“trade stimulators.” They eliminated the coin payout and
substituted tokens theoretically redeemable for
merchandise—a drink or a free cigar—but often used as
cash equivalents. The side-mounted gum dispenser was
replaced by a mint-vending device, which was built into the
front, further camouflaging the gambling function for
“marginal” territories. Slots were designed to “sell” everything
from golf balls to pencils to cigarettes and were disguised as
music boxes, beer barrels, strength testers, clocks, and
radios. The payout was designated “profit sharing” rather
than a prize. “Skill” elements were added, such as buttons
that let the player try to stop the reel on a particular symbol.
The machines were miniaturized so that a proprietor could
whip them off the counter at the first sight of the law.
Around 1917 Mills and another leading manufacturer,
Watling, each offered an “O.K. Operators Bell,” a machine
supposed to be okay with the law in all territories, no matter
how tight the local regulations. It could sell gum, pay in trade
checks, or tell fortunes. It employed “future pay,” dropping
the player’s winnings into an inaccessible receptacle to be
released only on the next pull of the handle. Since the player
always knew exactly what he would get back, he was
obviously not gambling. Reform-minded legislators were left
scratching their heads.
By 1920 alcohol had fallen victim to these same reformers’
wrath, threatening the slots’ most popular locations. But the
operators of speakeasies lost little sleep over the fine points
of gambling laws. As illicit watering holes proliferated, slot
sales burgeoned.
The slots were a natural during the go-for-broke twenties.
Many nickel machines were revamped to take quarters and
half-dollars, and the first silver-dollar bell machine appeared
in 1929. The decade also brought a pivotal innovation in the
machines’ technology, the jackpot. The idea went back to the
simple machines of the 1890s and had been tried from time
to time since. The coins accumulated behind glass, providing
tantalizing bait for players. When the three bars came up, the
machines spilled out a thrilling little bonanza in addition to the
traditional 20-coin prize. By the time of the stock market
crash, machines that didn’t offer jackpots were obsolete.
Struggling merchants, who split the machines’ take with their
distributors, often found the extra $25 or $50 a week a
means of staying solvent. “It’s the greatest instrument of
optimism that was ever developed,” Mills boasted of one of its
1933 machines, “… full of promise, fascination, hope, and
LIFE.”
During Prohibition, though, the public had begun to associate
slots with the underworld. They came to be seen as a racket
controlled by a sinister syndicate. In a 1932 Fortune
magazine profile of Mills Novelty titled “Plums, Cherries, and
Murder,” the editors warned that “big-time racketeers are
pressing more and more eagerly into this rich territory.”
All those nickels did attract criminals. In the early 1930s, the
mobster Frank Costello controlled more than 7,000 of the
estimated 25,000 slots in New York City. Government’s
answer was to pass even more draconian laws and to use
slot machines as photo opportunities for sledgehammer-
wielding politicians. Earl Warren, future Chief Justice of the
United States, built his reputation on his implacable
opposition to California’s slot machines; in New York, Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia, with the press in tow, floated a barge full
of slots into Long Island Sound in October 1934 and
consigned more than 1,000 of them to the deep.
World War II put the industry on hold as manufacturers
turned their machining skills to armament production. The
subsequent peace and prosperity brought a resurgence of
slots, but as Marshall Fey points out in his historical survey
Slot Machines, they “continued to operate in the twilight zone
of the law.” Then the ax fell.
Up until mid-century, states and municipalities had fought a
losing war against slots. Manufacturers had sold them openly
as local officials struggled to curb them. The Johnson Act,
signed by President Truman in 1951, attacked the machines
at their source, prohibiting their interstate shipment except to
locations where they were strictly legal, which meant only
Nevada, part of Idaho, and a few counties in Maryland. For
the slot-machine industry it was a staggering blow.
But hardly a knockout. Postwar America was a mobile
society; if the slots couldn’t come to the players, the players
would travel to the slots. Nevada had offered legal gambling
for twenty years. Harold’s Club in Reno became one of the
first casinos to aggressively promote its slot machines. By the
1950s the club had boosted the payout to 88 percent and
offered bigger jackpots; players responded by feeding the
machines for hours on end. Casino operators began to love
the slots’ predictable returns and low labor costs, and the
machines began to evolve to suit the casinos’ needs. They
grew flashier, with lighted cases and lurid graphics. They
became front-opening so they could be packed together
more closely and serviced with ease.
By the early 1960s the mechanical bell device, so long the
definitive design, had had its day. Some firms had been
offering electric-motor-driven slots as early as 1930, but
players had long resisted innovation; they liked the feel of
the traditional mechanisms. In 1963 the Bally Manufacturing
Company, a producer of pinball and arcade games,
introduced an electric slot machine with the mellifluous name
“Money Honey.” Gone were the slides that had always
controlled the payout. The Money Honey incorporated a
large hopper with an electric coin counter. Electromechanical
sensors let the machine detect more than 50 payout
combinations and disgorge large jackpots.
Slot designers quickly took advantage of the possibilities the
new technology offered. The machines could pay for symbols
on any of the three visible lines or for diagonal match-ups,
giving players many more ways to win. “Multiplier” machines
let the players increase their payouts by inserting more than
one coin, a revival of a concept that had flourished in the
1890s.
Bally came to dominate the market during the sixties as many
of the old-line manufacturers faded away. But at the edges of
the industry, small companies were experimenting with even
more radical changes in technology. The first solid-state
machine, based on motor drives and solenoid stops,
appeared in 1966. In 1975 video versions of the traditional
three-reel slot found a niche as novelty machines in the
market. Little by little these ideas won acceptance from
players.
The 1978 advent of gambling in Atlantic City gave the
industry a boost, and New Jersey regulations encouraged
competition by requiring casinos to purchase no more than
half their slot machines from a single manufacturer. But a
man named William S. (“Si”) Redd did the most to usher in
the modern age of slots. While working as a Bally salesman
and distributor in Nevada, Redd also made and distributed
novelty machines, including Brobdingnagian promotional
slots like “Big Bertha” and several versions of the incipient
video games. When he sold his distributing company to Bally
in 1975, he held on to the novelty portion. It was a prescient
move.
Throughout the seventies, logic cards and integrated circuits
took over from wiring, switches, and relays. At the same time,
casinos grew increasingly dependent on slots. By 1983 the
machines were contributing more than half of all casino
revenues. Casino managers found that higher payouts with
frequent small jackpots would boost their handle, and the
more and more popular dollar machines came to offer as
much as a 97.5 percent return. Truckloads of silver dollars
had to be shipped to Nevada to handle the action.
In 1981 Redd took his company public, changing its name to
International Game Technology. Its line of solid-state slots
put it into a highstakes duel with Bally, a contest in which it
held an ace in the hole. IGT enjoyed a monopoly on video
poker machines, which became the industry sensation of the
decade. The element of skill, combined with frequent wins,
mesmerized players. The devices helped establish IGT as
the leading slot machine manufacturer in the world.
In the mid-eighties IGT adopted an innovation that stood the
basic concept of the slot machine on its head. The spinning
reels had, since Charlie Fey’s “Card Bell,” been the means of
randomly determining the prizes a machine paid out. The IGT
machines used a computer to generate random numbers,
which decided the payout instantaneously. A stepper motor,
informed by an optic sensor, then deliberately stopped the
reels at positions the microprocessor had already chosen.
The technology left the reels as a mere artifact of the
machines’ history.
A 1930s reporter had described slot machines as “cash
registers dressed up for a circus.” Today they are the
apotheosis of glitz. Lights flash. Sound cards generate music
or replicate the sound of long-gone machinery. Video
displays decorate their fronts. They offer themes ranging
from Elvis Presley to “Jeopardy.” The popular “game within a
game” feature gives the player a second and third chance to
win. Multigame video machines offer everything from
blackjack to instant lotteries on one screen.
The handle that always distinguished the “one-armed bandit”
has long since become a vestigial limb; a push of a button is
all that’s needed. The idea of “free play” does away with
coins regularly tumbling into the payout cup; players
accumulate credits and just keep playing. Meanwhile, the
jackpots have grown to gargantuan proportions. Slot
machines linked electronically across an entire region have
resulted in mega jackpots exceeding $27 million, potentially
available to anyone on a single play.
Slot machines in Nevada casinos alone take in close to $6
billion a year. They represent as much as 74 percent of a
gambling operation’s revenues, dwarfing the take from the
traditional table games. Today they are spreading outside
the gambling halls; manufacturers hope the day is not far off
when they will return to bars. As a 1931 Mills flier said, “Who
can resist them?”
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