The History of Gambling Video Games Slots
The oldest mention about the automat with the money lottery belongs to 1887 year. That machine took coins but didn’t have any paying system, so the lottery was paid by the owner of the establishment.
In 1888 the USA had the machines which could carry out the jack pots. The first jackpot used the weight of the coins – when there were enough coins, under their weight the partition opened and won money came out. But the cleverest understood quickly that to get money you need to push the automat hardly. That’s why the model wasn’t widespread. In 1890 year the machine, imitating card game appeared. It had five drums, having on them imagination of real cards. After pulling the coins, the drums began to revolve and when the lottery combination appeared, the owner of the hall paid money to the winner.
Many slots were made at the beginning of the 1890 years.
Those, at that time primitive machines gave you back three coins instead of five, if the coin “went down the right way inside”.
The US was an ideal basic for such playing machines. In 1893 year San-Francisco’s newspaper wrote, that there were about 1500 five-cent automats, every day brought bigger number of them, but each of them made a very good profit.
The model of modern slot for taking additional money from the publicity appeared in 1895. It was invented by 29-years-old mechanic Charles Fey. And it was named “Liberty bell”. In his father’s garage he constructed automat which consisted of three situated after each other disks, having numbers on them. The biggest winning was 5 dollars for the combination 4-11-44.
In next post I will continue to describe this topic. Stay tuned!