Slot machines are gaming machines available in casinos and gambling halls. Born in the late nineteenth century in the United States of America, they have gone through a process of constant evolution. The advent of digital technologies has also affected slot machines, with the consequent development of digital versions.
The expansion of the Internet has projected the game to a new dimension, making it an integral part of the offering of modern online casinos. There are some quite big differences here – as you’ll know if you have played both options, the physical coin-operated version and the more technological and modern ones. In this article, we retrace the history of slot machines from their origins to the present day.
The birth of the “nickel slot machines”
As mentioned above, slot machines were born in the United States at the end of the 19th century due to the technical innovations brought by the American industrial revolution. In the same period when they saw the light bulb, technologies such as the phonograph, and the kinetoscope (ancestor of the movie projector as we know it today) also appeared as the first coin-operated amusement machines. After 1890, this new area gave rise to a famous analog: the slot machine.
The first devices spread from the East Coast across the country, but it was San Francisco where the two main types of slots were born. Between 1893 and 1894, Gustav Schultze created a line of self-paying reel machines that lit the spark. Just three years later, Charles Fey set up the “Liberty Bell” with three spinning reels. An entire industry was born from this one invention, and within thirty years, there were more than a million machines in operation around the world. Herbert Mills, a Chicago manufacturer, was the first to conquer the market, to the point that he is nicknamed the “Henry Ford of slot machines.”
The operation of the first slots
Born as machines for public entertainment, slot machines quickly established themselves as gambling options at the beginning of the 20th century, protagonists of a real boom in applications all over the United States. Once again, the US was the first to become known for something extremely innovative that would soon spread to the rest of the world!
From a technical point of view, the first machines are very simple: the player inserts a coin in the corresponding slot (hence the definition of “coin in the slot machine”) and turns the three reels by operating a mechanical lever.
In his book, Marshall Fey explains that the predecessors of slot machines had a coin track, two moving parts, and a spring; the nickel could drop into the right or left branch of the track, reloading the payout or cash deposit. For a long time, the operation of slot machines would remain completely mechanical. Springs, gears, and simple timers, already present in Schultze’s patent of 1894, would be gradually replaced by electronics, but only many years later.
From electronic to digital
The era of electronic casino games was inaugurated in 1964 by semiconductor electronic machines. These built-in seating slots were made in two- and four-player configurations. This is how Marshall Fey describes the early days of electronic slots. A pivotal event for electronic slots occurred in 1975 when Walt Fraley and Stan Fulton’s Fortune Coin introduced the first video slot machine in Las Vegas.
By the early 1980s, semiconductor technology had already given way to computer electronics. Microprocessors began effectively paving the way for modern digital slots. Meanwhile, the “slot” for chips is joined by those for banknotes, while the side lever disappears from the new generation models.
The 1990s saw the gradual transition of slot machines from physical to virtual casinos (the first mobile versions appeared in 2005). The shift has contributed to increasing the complexity of the gaming proposition; virtual slots have made it possible, under certain conditions, to take advantage of numerous bonuses, which are one of the parameters of choice for users. In addition, remote gaming concessionaires reserve the right to freely determine the main parameters of the game, such as paylines, single bet amount, and volatility.
Today, the growth of online gaming is accelerating and, as a result, digital channels are gaining significant market share at the expense of physical casinos. Most people, in fact, now prefer to play from their smartphones, directly from the couches of their homes, rather than go looking for the nearest casino to play slots or any other game of chance like blackjack or roulette.
Finally, we can say that the new frontier of online gaming is inevitably going to be altered again by artificial intelligence, which is already widely applied in the process of developing new digital slots, as well as in personalizing the gaming experience so more people can enjoy it.
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