Slot Machine History
From the Liberty Bell to digital reels — how the one-armed bandit changed the world.
The History of the Slot Machine — Context for the Simulation
The first true slot machine was the Liberty Bell, invented by Charles Fey in San Francisco around 1895. It had three spinning reels with five symbols: horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts, and the cracked Liberty Bell that gave it its name. A matching row of three bells paid the top prize — ten nickels.
For decades, slot machines were purely mechanical. A spring-loaded lever (the original “one-armed bandit”) set the reels spinning; friction and gravity stopped them. The outcome was genuinely random in the physical sense. Modern electronic machines use a Random Number Generator (RNG) — a computer algorithm that produces an unpredictable sequence of numbers thousands of times per second. The moment you press Spin, the current number maps to a reel position. The spinning animation is theatre; the result was already chosen.
Mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) inadvertently contributed to slot machine history. He was attempting to build a perpetual motion machine when he invented an early roulette wheel prototype — and in doing so pioneered the mathematical theory of probability that underpins every game of chance. Probability theory was born from gambling.
Our Slot Machine Saga app simulates
the reel mechanism using p5.js. The reels don’t use a true RNG —
they use JavaScript’s Math.random(), which is a
pseudo-random generator. Good enough for a classroom demo;
not good enough for a real casino.
Movie clip is only available in larger viewports.
On some mobile devices, rotating to landscape will allow viewing.