Slot machine symbols were originally made as fruits as a disguise. Every wondered why slot machines have fruit symbols on the wheels? Well that's because the machines acquired symbols of lemons and cherries in order to be disguised as candy dispensers back when gambling was illegal. During the early 1900's, slot machines did dispense fruit.
The story of the slot machine is one of intrigue, theft, controversy, and murder. Okay, not murder, but everything else. And it starts in Bavaria….
Augustinus Charles Fey was the youngest of sixteen children born in 1862 in the small village of Vohringen, Bavaria which sits at the edge of the Alps. Early on, he displayed an interest in mechanics, following his brothers’ footsteps and working in a farm tool factory in Munich. At fifteen, August hit the road (apparently fearful of his strict father and not wanting to serve in the military) and walked across Europe. He stopped in France for about three years, working as an intercom equipment manufacturer, and then made his way to a British shipyard (approximately 750 miles and an English channel away from home), where he settled down for five years as a nautical instrument maker.
Several years before, August’s uncle (his mother’s brother) had moved to and settled in New Jersey. The family received letters from him talking of fortune and the good life America provided. So, August saved his money and made the pilgrimage to the United States. He arrived in New Jersey and lived with his uncle’s family in Hoboken (the birth place of baseball), but quickly made the decision to try his hand out west in the “lawless” town of San Francisco. He arrived there approximately in 1884/1885 at around 23 years old, right when the city was attempting to change itself, for better and worse.
In 2013, maps of San Francisco were uncovered from the late 19th century. These maps showed numerous gambling halls, opium dens, and brothels dotting the city, with each vice-ridden location color-coded on the maps. Despite this, little was done at this time by the local government and police force about these illegal establishments.
In this environment, Fey used his skills as a mechanic and found a job at California Electric Works (later Western Electric, which went defunct in 1995). He worked as an instrument maker and while doing this befriended a German foreman, Theodore Holtz, who will come into this story again later. It was also about this time that he met Marie Christine Volkmar, the daughter of a cigar shop owner, with whom he fell in love with.
Unfortunately, he contracted consumption, aka tuberculosis (see: Why Tuberculosis was Called Consumption), and hit the road again, this time for warmer weather in Mexico. While there, his health did not improve, so he returned to San Fran, thinking if he was going to die, it might as well be near the woman he loved. He miraculously got better (potentially due to the controversial use of creosote, obtained through the distillation of tar) and married Marie in 1889. They would go on to have four children together. To top off the metamorphosis going on in his life, August Charles Fey changed his name to Charles Fey, reportedly because he hated being called “Gus.”
At this point, Fey began tinkering with creating and inventing his own mechanical devices. Always a fan of making money, he frequented the gambling halls of San Francisco and noticed the so-called “nickel-in-the-slot” machines that were rapidly becoming popular. These machines were much closer to vending machines than to what we think of slot machines today, dispensing cigars or drink tickets. These also usually required a human, the cigar shop owner or barkeep, to give you your prize. The most popular ones were the poker machines that would actually flip real playing cards on five reels, revealing the hand. The better the hand, the more drink/cigar tickets you earned. These types of machines were so ubiquitous that a San Francisco Daily News headline noted, “Fiveteen Hundred Swindling Machines in One City!”
In 1893, Fey thought he could make a better gambling machine. His work friend Theodore Holtz introduced him to another German who was working at California Electric Works, Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Schultze. On August 8, 1893, Schultze had patented his own “coin-controlled apparatus,” called the “Horseshoe.” This was the first US patent issued for a gambling machine and was the first to somewhat resemble what we now know as a modern slot machine. In fact, some historians have argued that Schultz, not Fey, should be the one known as the “Thomas Edison of slot machines.” We will come back to that later. Either way, Fey was impressed and “inspired” by the Horseshoe and went to work on his own coin-controlled apparatus.
In 1894, Fey designed a version of the Horseshoe, quite simply the same machine, but with a better mechanical reel, and asked Holtz to be his equal business partner (and not Schultz.) Holtz agreed and they both quit their jobs at California Electric, setting up shop as “Holtz and Fey Electric Works” at 39 Stevenson Street. Purposefully, they positioned their shop close to Schultz’s shop, who had also quit his job to make gambling machines. This should have set up a rivalry, except for the fact that Holtz and Fey were also selling leftover parts to Schultz, presumably because Schultz had no clue that they were also making gambling machines and had essentially stolen his idea.
In any event, in the basement of his house in 1895, Fey completed his next mechanical wonder, an even more modified version of the Horseshoe he called the “4-11-44” in homage to a popular lottery game at the time called “Policy,” in which the rare winning sequence was 4-11-44.
This machine is one of the reasons so many give Fey the credit for inventing the slot machine. It was a three-disc floor machine and was unlike any other ever created because instead of spitting out tokens or slips, it had the ability to dispense actual coins. They put it in a local San Francisco saloon and it was a hit and a huge money maker. Fey and Holtz went to work producing more, but before they got very far, Fey, once again, went packing.
Fey sold his share of his company with Holtz to start his own company, Charles Fey & Company. (Holtz also founded his own company and called it “Novelty Machine Works”.)
In 1897, Fey further staked his claim as the “Thomas Edison of slot machines,” when he devised the Card Bell slot machine, a “three-reel, staggered-stop machine with automatic payout.” Essentially, what it did was stagger the stops – first one reel, then the second, and then the third – just like modern slot machines, creating suspense, drama, and excitement. At first, he used playing card symbols, but two years later, he replaced them with stars and bells and called it the “Liberty Bell” slot machine. With ten symbols on each reel and ten stops, it allowed for numerous combinations. It was unlike anything else on the market, including Schultz’s machines.
It should be noted here that, technically, slot machines at this time were illegal (though, most law officials rarely policed them). As such, even though Schultz was awarded a patent in 1893 for his machine, when he tried to sue Holtz (he did name several other defendants in his documents, including Fey, but Holtz was the main defendant), the courts ruled that the patent didn’t protect him because a gambling machine was illegal. Because of this, the gambling and slot machine industry, from then on, was a bit like the wild wild west – ideas, designs, and concepts were stolen right and left.
As for Fey, he never patented any of his machines nor sold or leased them. He would operate them himself by making agreements with the proprietors (bars, cigar shops, etc.) for a 50/50 split of the profits.
In the end, Fey’s machines were a hit and became the “the largest slot operation in the country during the early 1900s.”
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Bonus Facts:
- In 1906, one of Fey’s machines went missing from a Powell Street saloon. It later turned up at the Chicago factory of the Mills Novelty Company, one of Fey’s major competitors. They had pulled it apart, to see why it was making more money than any of their machines. They figured out that, due to only three symbols being visible to the player, the suspense created enticed more “customers.” So, they created their own slot machine – calling it the Mills Liberty Bell slots. Yeah, not even really changing the name. Yet Fey could do nothing – he never patented it and even if he did, the courts would rule that they couldn’t protect it anyway.
- In 2006, the Nevada State Museum acquired many of Fey’s old slot machines, photographs, and memorabilia from his grandsons. They were previously at the Liberty Belle Restaurant and Saloon in Reno, before the establishment closed. Buying it at under appraised value, the collection is “one of the finest slot machine collections in the world.”
- Around the time Fey was arriving in San Francisco, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was enacted, curtailing Chinese immigration tremendously in San Fran, from 40,000 people arriving in the city in 1881 to ten (yup, just ten) in 1887.
- Image via Vlada Z / Shutterstock.com
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- Factoid: In Nevada, you can drive at 16, vote and smoke cigarettes at 18, but you must be 21 to drink alcohol or gamble.
- Factoid: Nevada is Spanish for 'snow-capped.' Las Vegas is Spanish for 'the fertile valley' or 'the meadows.'
Las Vegas is generally recognized to have begun in 1905 when the Union Pacific Railroad began passing through a desert oasis ...an ideal refueling point and rest stop. Las Vegas is Spanish for 'The Meadows' ...a name it got due to the availability of spring-fed water. In 2005 - 100 years later - Vegas commemorated and celebrated its centennial. Las Vegas loves to party!
It was incorporated as a city in 1911. Eager for employment during the Great Depression of the 1930's, thousands of workers began pouring into the area when Boulder Dam (later renamed Hoover Dam) was being built on the Colorado River.
Nevada was the first state to legalize casino-style gambling. It got its start in 1931 when Clark County (Nevada) issued a three month gaming license to a downtown Las Vegas club. A three mile dusty desert road nicknamed the 'Strip' sprang up south of downtown.
A little known fact is that the famous Las Vegas Strip is really not located in the Las Vegas city limits and actually comes under the jurisdiction of Clark County. One of the earliest strip resorts was the Flamingo Hotel, built by gangsters Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel and Meyer Lansky. Built with mob money, the Flamingo opened on New Year's Eve 1946.
In the early days, there was no state speed limit, no sales tax, no waiting period for marriages, no state income tax and gambling was totally unregulated. Gamblers used silver dollars, later to be replaced with silver-dollar-size plastic chips.
By the early 1950's Las Vegas had become a true vacation destination ...the era of Elvis, the Rat Pack and Liberace. (It also was the quickie divorce and marriage capital of the U.S.).
There were about 1,800 hotel rooms on the Strip. The best hotels charged $7.50 a day back then, a motel, $3.00. Times have changed. Year-round rates now range between $50.00 and $300.00 a night ...sometimes more, sometimes less. The average is around $95 a day (center strip) for what is nearly 150,000 total Las Vegas hotel rooms. But one thing has not changed. The average stay in Las Vegas is still 3 or 4 days. Most visitors usually stay for the weekend ...and to a lessor extent: Sunday through Thursday (which is a better value.)
Multiple coin slot machines arrived in the 1960's. Mechanical penny and nickel slot machines evolved into computerized dollar slot machines. Today you can find machines that accept $500 chips. Payouts grew from a few hundred dollars to today's several million dollar progressive jackpots.
Early 1900s Slot Machine
The oldest resort hotels (about fifty years old) still operating under their original name include the Flamingo, Riviera and theTropicana. In 1957, Minskys Follies at the Dunes Resort became the first to debut topless showgirls on the Las Vegas strip.
In 1960, the Stardust became the first hotel to present a production show spectacular. It imported the Lido de Paris from France. The Tropicana Hotel bought the American rights to the spectacular Folies Bergere in1959 and the show continued for nearly 50 years. Its last performance was March 28, 2009. When it closed, it was the longest running.show in Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas Convention Center opened in 1959. The objective was to fill empty hotel rooms with conventioneers during the slack tourist months. It now contains 1.5-million-square-feet of exhibit space, one of the largest in the world. More than 5.5 million convention delegates meet in Las Vegas every year.
Caesars Palace opened in 1966 ...followed by several hotel-casinos developed in the 1970's, 80's and 90's. Some of the older hotels (Caesars being an exception), have not kept pace with the quality offered by the newer resorts. So we will be featuring the newer, better hotels on our trip. We will tell you what to do, where to go ...and how to save money.
The Las Vegas strip is always in a state of turmoil ...always building, expanding and remodeling. We manage to see something new every time we go. For one thing, the 'family' vacation theme is now ancient history. Las Vegas is now catering to adults and conventioneers who have money to gamble. Sin City has arrived.
Several older hotels were imploded in the late 1990's to make room for new mega-resorts catering to the big spender. The Dunes became the Bellagio; the Sands became the Venetian, the Hacienda became the Mandalay Bay and the Desert Inn became the new Wynn Las Vegas mega-resort. These 'new direction resorts' are (in my opinion) the best of what Las Vegas has to offer in the way of lodging and amenities.
Their cost is not beyond the reach of the average vacationer if you know the 'system' of how Las Vegas keeps its 150,000-plus rooms constantly occupied. The Vegas World (itself a legend in Las Vegas history) became the Stratosphere in 1996, but it is far from being in the same quality class and its location (on the far North end of the strip) is poor.
The 'new Vegas' - mega-casinos on The strip
Early 1900s Antique Slot Machines
Visionary Steve Wynn is credited with building some of the best and most luxurious Las Vegas hotels ...each successive one being better (and more lavish) than the last. He changed Las Vegas' emphasis from that of gambling to being an upscale resort destination.
Wynn started with the Golden Nugget (downtown); sold that and went on to build the Mirage, Treasure Island and the Bellagio hotel-casinos on The Strip.
He ushered in the era of luxury (and hugely expensive) hotels in 1989; all have been a unbelieveably successful. (Trivia: Steve Wynn' was actually born Stephen Alan Weinberg.)
He was the first to bring the unknown Canadian Cirque du Soleil acrobatic troupe to Vegas and Treasure Island. And nearly two decades later, 'Mystere' is still performing there. Today, there are seven Cirque du Soleil shows playing in Las Vegas that regularly sell out and another is looming in the horizon.
MGM Grand Corp. purchased the Mirage, Treasure Island and the Bellagio in 2000. Wynn's next venture was a new 50-story, $2.7 billion project -- built in 2005 on the old Desert Inn property. Called the the 'Wynn Las Vegas' ...it is one of the most luxurious resort-hotels in Las Vegas. Wynn followed it up with Encore Resort next door in 2010.
Macau (a former Portuguese colony) along with Hong Kong became two special administrative regions of the Peopes Republic of China in 1997 and 1999. The Portuguese government legalized gambling in Macau in the 1850s and China continued that policy. Steve Wynn opened the 'Wynn Macau' in 2006. There are dozens of casinos in Macau and in 2007, Macau overtook the Las Vegas Strip in gaming revenues.
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