After building a few of them, placing them in locations, and doing very well with them, he then opened a factory in San Francisco to work on his machines full-time.īut Fey wanted to build a machine that would pay out automatically. When Charles began building machines, he initially built ones that were similar the popular poker machines and called them by various names, like the 'Duke' and the 'Klondike'. The machines paid out prizes, like a free cigar or free drinks, which were distributed manually by an attendant. These machines were very profitable and were used in hundreds of locations (mainly in cigar stands) in the 90's (the 1890's that is). The most popular one, invented by Sittman and Pitt of New York, was a 'poker machine' that was similar to a slot machine and used 5 reels with 10 poker cards on each reel. Poker Machinesīefore Fey’s invention there were other coin-operated games of chance. In order to understand the history of the slot machine though we need to jump back a little in time.
The first mechanical slot machine was invented in the late 1800's by a Bavarian imiagrant named Charles Fey (1862-1944) in San Francisco.
