Month: January 2019

‘Roulette’ is the French word for ‘caster’ or, in other words, a small wheel. Given the French name, it should really come as no surprise that conventional wisdom dictates that roulette was created by French mathematician Blaise Pascal, in 1655, during his investigations into hypothetical perpetual motion. Pascal was an inveterate gambler – in fact, the previous year he and Pierre de Fermat had invented probability theory to solve a gambling problem – so was familiar with two popular contemporary games, known as ‘Roly Poly’ and ‘Even/Odd’, which had many similarities to modern roulette.

Roulette became popular in French casinos, as it did in the gambling houses opened by Prince Charles of Monaco, in the late eighteenth century. By that stage, the roulette wheel had evolved into a recognisable form, with 36 numbers, coloured red or black, but with both a single zero and double zero. The next stage in the evolution of the roulette wheel came in the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was overhauled by two French brothers, Louis and Francois Blanc. The Blanc brothers removed the double zero pocket, thereby creating what is traditionally known as the French, or European, roulette table. The single-zero version offers a house edge of just 2.7%, compared with 5.26% for the double-zero wheel – which is still used in modern casinos, to play so-called American roulette – and was created to compete with other casinos of the time on that basis.

The first slots, or slot machine, in the sense of a coin-operated gambling machine, to achieve national popularity in the U.S. was an automated poker game introduced by Sittman and Pitt in 1893. The machine, which cost a nickel, or 5¢, to play, consisted of five drums, or reels, with a total of 50 playing card symbols. Players inserted a coin, pulled a handle to set the reels in motion, and the object of the game was to align a winning poker hand. However, unlike later games, which released the payoff into a receptacle at the bottom, the machine had no direct payout mechanism, so prizes were collected from an attendant.

However, the man credited with the invention of the first slot machine to automatically pay out coins, rather than tickets or tokens, was Charles Fey. In 1894, Fey designed his own version of the ‘Horseshoe’, previously patented by fellow German emigrant Theodor Holz in 1893 and, in 1898, the famous ‘Liberty Bell’. The Liberty Bell consisted of just three reels, each with a series of just five symbols, diamond, heart, spade, horseshoe and, of course, an authentic, cracked Liberty Bell. By reducing the complexity of the payout permutations, Fey incorporated an automatic payout mechanism, making the Liberty Bell more appealing, and lucrative, than contemporary coin-operated machines. Indeed, the Liberty Bell was the most popular slot machine of its day and formed the basis of modern slots. Naturally, three Liberty Bells produced the highest payoff, of 50¢.