The Operator Bell & Silent Bell

Pitt and Sittman developed gaming machine that can become the precursor of the future slot machines in the New York City. The slots machine game involves the idea of playing poker but holds 5 drums each having fifty cards and this game is being liked like hot dogs by gamblers in New York City.

The credit of designing this wonderful machine goes to Fey who designed the game capable of producing automatic pay-outs against all winning combinations. The idea involves the replacement of ten cards by five symbols namely, Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, Horseshoes and cracked Liberty Bell and using 3 reels instead of 5 drums and hence reducing the overall complexity to read a win. Combination of 3 bells at the same time brings the largest payoff of ten nickels or fifty cents.

The attractive symbol of the game has made it more popular and this is what makes it popular as ‘Liberty Bells’.

A Flourishing Industry

By the first decade of the twentieth century, slot machines could be found everywhere. Operator Bell was introduced by The Mills Novelty Company after minor variations in Liberty Bell’s design. Use of fruit symbols was a salient feature of this machine. The Mills Novelty company was progressing to introduce five more variant versions of Liberty Bell but meanwhile, the World War1 broke out, the company was also endangered as more than 30,000 gaming machines had been manufactured in its factories across different countries including Europe.

The reign of cast iron machines came to an end with the introduction of cheap wooden machines by Mills and in the early 1930’s there were many other changes introduced in the slot machines by Mills that revolutionized the gaming industry.

Double jackpot was introduced to enable the players win twice in nippy succession. These machines produced lesser noise and were named as “Silent Bells”

New Trends for New Era

In 1978 when gambling was legalized in the Atlantic City, Bally prevailed more than 90% of this industry. The company kept on increasing the number of reels making it tougher to win the jackpot along with maximizing it. With 25 symbols on each reel, the bet raised to $5 to $100. Bally hired Inge Telnaus, a skilled programmer of that time, to increase the jackpot size without lowering company’s profit. Telnaus made use of a random number generator to mutate the imaginary reels and thus changing the winning amounts. Slot machines were revolutionized by this idea opening great opportunities for this business like the California gold fields.