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Inventor Charles Fey had been making coin-operated machines in San Francisco for nearly ten years prior to creating his Liberty Bell in 1898. Although other payout machines preceded it, the Liberty Bell was the first automatic-payout, three-reel machine. It established the standard for more than a million slot machines made by other manufacturers during the twentieth century. Because only three symbols of the thousand combinations (10 x 10 x 10) were shown with each spin, players could not calculate the payout percentage as they did on the hundred-combination color-wheel machines. In addition, three reels were far more entertaining with more suspenseful, near-miss opportunities than the single stop of an exposed color-wheel payout disc. Fey’s invention became an instant success. Of the nearly one hundred models produced, seven are known to exist today. All objects are courtesy of Joe Welch American Antique Museum in San Bruno, California. See "#GamesofChance: Gambling Devices of the Mechanical Age", on display, post-security, in Terminal 3. http://bit.ly/GamesofChance
This image was posted on January 11, 2017.