History of Slots

The history of slots started in1887 with the invention of the very first one in California. This the first of all slot machines was built by Charles Fey and had three reels with five symbols on each reel. The symbols that Fey choose to be on the reels were a horseshoe, a diamond, a heart, a spade and a bell. Perhaps unfortunately for Fey, gambling was illegal in California and so he had to sell his machines outside of the state boundaries but this did not stop his slot machine from becoming popular and his sales continued to rise. It only took the slot machine a couple of years to become well known and popular and so by 1891, the New York manufacturers Sittman and Pitt decided it was time to make slot machines of their own. These slot machines were different from Fey’s and they had five reels with 10 symbols on each reel. Instead of using similar symbols to Fey’s, the New Yorkers decided to use playing cards as their symbols and also decided that in order to get a win, you have to line up the symbols with a poker hand.

The next advancement in slot machines came in 1963 when the first fully electromagnetic slot machine was built by Bally manufacturers. This would also mark the first time that wins of up to 500 coins could be paid out by a slot machine, without the assistance of an attendant.

In 1976 the first video slot machine was introduced to the Strip in Las Vegas and it was a huge success, so much so that now all casinos reserve more space for the playing of slots than anything else and it is said that there are now a total of eight slot machines for every person in Las Vegas.

It was around this same time that slot machines started to be made with hundreds of different themes and many of their producers were putting up to 50 pay lines on the slots, whilst other producers did away with pay lines completely and settled for just having 243 different paying options on the reel s.