1638–1976
How the casino and the slot machine were built
We see the casino hall and the slot machine as two limbs of a single tale. Each responded to gambling that already thrived, unpoliced, in taverns and back rooms. The first response was built from bricks: a room the state could observe. The second was built from gears: a machine that never bickered, never rested, and paid only what its mechanism allowed.
A little house, opened by the state
The root of casino is casa — house — reduced to the sense of a little house. Among Venetians of the eighteenth century, a casino of this kind meant nothing more than a modest private flat for socialising: cards, company, talk, little else. Its gambling sense came later, after one such small house cemented the association for good.
The Ridotto was that little house, and it opened in 1638 within the Palazzo Dandolo. It was the Venetian government that established it, acting entirely of its own accord. So the West gained its first public, state-approved gambling hall — not some private den in disguise. Money was not the primary aim. Betting was already rampant throughout the city and mostly unchecked. Drawing it beneath a single supervised roof allowed officials to see who played, in what way, and for how long. Supervision came first, with profit trailing after.
From supervision to survival
Two centuries later, Monaco needed money more than it needed order. The principality was close to bankrupt by the 1850s, its economy thin and its treasury thinner. In 1863 François Blanc opened a casino at Monte Carlo, and the effect was immediate: gambling revenue rebuilt the state. The Monte Carlo casino became the template that resort-casino projects worldwide later borrowed, Australia included — a purpose-built pleasure district, funded by play rather than by trade or taxation.
One word, two meanings
Casino still carries both senses. A small clubhouse in an Italian town might still be called a casino with no cards in sight. English borrowed only the gambling half, and dropped the diminutive tenderness entirely.
Three reels, five symbols, no patent
The mechanical half of our story opens in San Francisco, 1895, when Charles Fey built the Liberty Bell. Three spinning reels each carried five symbols:
- Diamonds
- Hearts
- Horseshoes
- Spades
- The Liberty Bell itself
Fey never patented the design. Competitors copied it freely, reel arrangement and all, which is one reason the three-reel, five-symbol format spread so fast and so uniformly across the country. A shape with no owner becomes everyone's shape.
Paid in gum, not coin
Early American machines often could not legally pay out cash. Where cash prizes were illegal, they paid in goods instead:
- A drink at the bar
- A cigar
- A packet of chewing gum
That workaround is why fruit symbols still spin on modern reels, and why the letters BAR still appear on them. Both trace back to the Bell-Fruit Gum Company, whose product supplied one of the commonest goods payouts. The symbols outlived the law that made them necessary by more than a century.
The resort-casino model radiated outward from Monte Carlo long before the slot machine did the same from San Francisco. Both spread the way successful, unpatented ideas always spread: by being copied wherever a coastline, or a floor, could hold them.
The lever nobody needed
In 1963, Bally's Money Honey became the first slot machine that was fully electromechanical! Electric motors spun its reels instead of a lever pull, and a deep hopper underneath dispensed up to five hundred coins without any attendant topping it up.
It was the lever on the side that earned the machine its nickname, the one-armed bandit. To turn its reels, Money Honey required no such lever — a motor handled that — yet makers went on attaching one for decades. Pulling something was what players expected. So the lever endured as a gesture well past the point where it functioned as a mechanism.
From drum to screen, 1976
The last mechanical limit fell in 1976, when the Fortune Coin Company built the first video slot machine on a modified nineteen-inch Sony television and placed it on the floor of a Las Vegas casino. A spinning drum can only hold so many stops — the diameter sets a hard ceiling on how many symbols fit. A screen has no such ceiling. It can display any number of reels, any number of lines, any arrangement at all.
That single change, from drum to display, is what made modern multi-line games possible. Everything since has been variation on a limit that no longer exists.
A short honest aside: nobody is entirely sure when Australians began calling these machines pokies. The word had settled into common use by the mid-twentieth century, likely as an affectionate shortening of poker machine, and it stuck to the video and electromechanical descendants just as readily as it had stuck to the mechanical originals.
Five dates worth keeping straight
- 1638
The Ridotto opens
Palazzo Dandolo, Venice — the West's first state-run gambling house.
- 1863
Monte Carlo opens
François Blanc's casino rebuilds a near-bankrupt principality.
- 1895
The Liberty Bell
Charles Fey's three-reel machine, San Francisco, never patented.
- 1963
Money Honey
Bally's first fully electromechanical machine; the hopper pays up to 500 coins.
- 1976
The first video slot
Fortune Coin Company, built on a modified Sony television.