How this site is built
The reading list behind Spinning House
We built this site from three kinds of paper, and we do not pretend they carry equal weight.
Original documents
Patent filings sit at the top of our shelf. Charles Fey's 1895 reel mechanism, and the trail of imitators who copied it after he never patented the Liberty Bell, are traceable through the drawings themselves, not through later retellings. Municipal archives sit beside them. Venice's own state records describe the 1638 conversion of rooms inside the Palazzo Dandolo into the Ridotto, on the government's own initiative — a decision made in council, not in legend.
Manufacturer and industry technical histories
We rely on two key sources, each with limits. - Bally's own telling of the 1963 Money Honey. This was the first fully electromechanical machine. It had a bottomless hopper paying out up to five hundred coins. The account is useful, yet partly self-serving. - The Fortune Coin Company's 1976 video slot. Built on a modified 19-inch Sony television. It reaches us mainly through trade-press write-ups, not a surviving company archive. We study these sources closely. We verify them wherever independent records exist.
General histories of gambling and resort development
Broader histories, of Monte Carlo's 1863 reinvention under François Blanc, of the diminutive word 'casino' drifting from a private summerhouse to a public hall, help us place a single machine or a single room inside a longer pattern. They are the least reliable tier on any specific date or figure, and the most useful for the shape of the whole story.
Why the first tier carries the most weight
We weight patent drawings and council minutes heaviest because they cannot be revised for a later audience. A casino operator's centenary booklet can be. So can a gambling-support charity's campaign leaflet. We read both — operators for the detail they get right about their own machines, charities for the pattern of harm they describe — but we do not cite either as historical fact. Marketing exists to sell a floor; campaign material exists to change behaviour. Neither is written to be checked against a 1638 council minute, and we hold that against them, gently.
If you want to check a claim yourself
- PATENT SEARCH
Search by inventor and mechanism
Look for the inventor's name alongside terms like 'coin-operated' and 'reel' in the patent office's own historical index, then read the drawings, not the summary.
- MUNICIPAL ARCHIVE
Request council or state records
Ask the relevant city or state archive for licensing and property records from the year in question, not a tourism history.
- MANUFACTURER VS INDEPENDENT
Compare the two accounts
A manufacturer's own history tends to date its own firsts precisely and its rivals' firsts vaguely; an independent trade-press account usually does the reverse.
A note on citation
Where we cannot name a source without inventing one, we say so plainly rather than dressing the page up with a report that does not exist. Readers who want more should go to the archive itself, not to the operator.