The History and Evolution of Slot Machines
Slot machines are among the most popular games at casinos, both land-based and online. Online casino slots are much easier to play than the more challenging baccarat, craps and poker. The most popular type of online casino slots these days feature video reels. The earliest slot was a modest machine. It was called a poker gambling machine, also known as the one-armed bandit.
The First Slot Machine
One-armed bandit or the poker gambling machine was developed in 1891 by a company called Sittman and Pitt based in New York. The machine had more than five drums and fifty symbols. The drums were the reels. The fifty symbols were cards. The design is still found in fruit machine slots. Each of the five drums displayed ten cards. There was a lever on the side that had to be pulled to spin the reels. There was a poker hand. The highest hand won. This primitive slot machine did not have any dispensing mechanism. There was no coin or payment doled out of the machine. The bar had to give out the rewards. Back then, the reward was usually a free drink or a cigarette.
The First Automatic Slot Machine
The late nineteenth century was a time for great industrial transformations. It took just four years for the first slot to make way for an automatic machine. This automatic slot was developed by Charles Fey. An engineer and mechanic by training, Charles Fey came up with a simple mechanism that could have an automated payout feature. He reduced the reels from five to three. The number of symbols was reduced too. The lever remained on the side. The reels would spin like they did in the other slots of the era. The highest combination was three bell symbols. Charles Fey went on to develop many other gambling machines. He also designed and developed the trade check separator.
Evolution of Slot Machines
Online casino slots, whether the traditional variant or video reels, still resemble many of the earliest and the subsequently popular features that evolved over the past hundred years. Slots were banned for some time at the turn of the twentieth century. The prohibition did not actually stop production and use of the machines. Their popularity increased during this time.
Classic machines and the contemporary online casino slots have celebrated playing cards, fruit symbols, bells and other imageries representing pop culture. For eight decades, the slot machine had a lever on the side. Bally Manufacturing came up with the first design without a lever on the side. This was the first electromechanical slot. The machine was known as Money Honey. It had the ability to dispense coins without any intervention of attendants. The machine was introduced in 1963. The subsequent decade witnessed the emergence of video slots.
Even before online slot สล็อตคาสิโนออนไลน์ machines were possible, due to the absence of a technology we now call the internet, video slots got popular through the seventies after they received approval from the gaming commission of the state of Nevada. Modern video slots came much later, in the nineties. The first of all online slot machines was hosted in 1994.
