What is known about the first one-arm bandit?
first ONE-ARM BANDIT.
The first ONE-ARM BANDIT was the nickel-in-the-slot three-reel Liberty Bell, manufactured in San Francisco by Bavarian immigrant Charles Fey in 1905. This was by no means the first coin-operated gambling machine, but it was the earliest with a variable automatic payout. The symbols used were bells, hearts, diamonds, -spades and horseshoes, the lowest payout being one nickel for two horseshoes and the highest ten nickels for three bells. Fey did not have the resources to exploit his machine on a large scale, so turned his design over to the Mills Novelty Co. of Chicago in return for the first 50 machines off the production line. They made several improvements. increasing the number of combinations from 1,000 to 8,000 (still standard today), and enlarging the apertures so that rows above and below the line-up were visible. This enabled the player to see if he had just missed a winning combination and enticed him to have another go. The reason for substituting fruit for Fey’s original symbols, from about 1908, was that some states enacted laws against gambling machines which paid out money. The oranges, pears, cherries, etc. of the ‘fruit machine’ represented the Bell Fruit Gum that could be claimed as a prize, or more strictly speaking—to keep within the law—free sample. The first fruit machines in Britain were imported by Mills at the end of World War I. Fey’s original 1905 Liberty Bell is preserved at the casino of the same name in Reno, Nevada.
