THE FRUIT MACHINE

Fruit machines are so profitable that UScasinos are reported to make the bulk of their profits from their vast floors ofmachines (with extra large stakes and payouts). In the UK betting shops now make60% of their profits from their machines. At the other end of the spectrumsmall seaside arcades in the UK subsidise their ‘family entertainmentmachines’ from the takings of their fruit machines.

Its easy not to realise just how addictivefruit machines are. If you just try one once, you’ll probably lose. I wasbrought up to assume the machines were rip-offs so I never put more than acouple of coins in one– and thisusually just confirmed what I’d been taught. I only recently realised, afterI’d restored an old clockwork Mills fruit machine, that using it twenty times I waslikely to win once or twice and often ended up ahead. In the UK fruit machineshave to state the exact percentage of coins they payout (at least 80% of thecoins inserted). Every country in the world has banned them at one point or another – and now though the machines are rarely still banned, they continue to be regulated in great detail.
As countries have initiated national lotteries as a source of income, it hasbeen less easy to argue that fruit machines are inherently bad. They now have tobe treated as just another from of gambling, so the machines’ regulation hasgenerally relaxed.

The Judge was made by the Mills Manufacturing company in1899. The handle spun the roulette wheel. Each of the 5 coin slots representsone of the 5 symbols repeated round the wheel - win if you select the symbolwhere the wheel stops. The very first mechanical gambling machine is oftenclaimed to bethe US 1888 ‘EUREKA BOX’. This was a small glass fronted case with a pile ofcoins inside – the jackpot. The played coins fell on a weighing scale, andwhen their cumulative weight tipped the balance, the jackpot was released. Thereare no surviving examples. Other similar machines called ‘Two Door Bank’ and‘Pyramid Banker’ followed. Machines soon become more elaborate – like‘The Judge’ above.

In Europe smaller wall mounted machines were at first morepopular, like Roll out the barrel, left and domino, right. Several machines imitated dealing a hand of cards – sometimes 5 cardsand sometimes 3 – with some ‘winning’ hands.

Charles Fey, working in San Fransisco in1906, made the first recognisable 3 reel machine, with playing card symbols onthe reels. Called The Liberty Bell, his design was re-engineered by the Millscompany of Chicago and then copied by other manufacturers. These early gamblingmachines were mainly placed in bars.

In an attempt to make them acceptablein shops and other public places a Mr O D Jennings, who ran a company calledIndustry Novelty Company, replaced the playing card symbols with pictures offruit, calling the machine a chewing gum dispenser (the fruits indicating theflavours of the gum).
Some of these machines, like the one above even had gum vending machines 'builtin'. The legality of these ‘gum dispensers’ was oftentested in US courts, but the manufacturers usually won.

The visible‘jackpot’ (in the centre of the eagle's chest above) first appeared in 1931 and became a permanent addition.As payouts increased concerns grew,until governments started to tax the machines in the mid 30s. Some US stateswent further and banned all coin-op machines. The nazis banned gambling machinesin Germany in 1937 and later in all their occupied territories. The Johnson actof 1951 banned fruit machines from US public places, (see photo at top of page)restricting them to designated ‘casinos’.
Despite this the machines continued to be developed, particularly with theintroduction of Bally’s ‘Money Honey’ in 1963. Previously the payouts hadcome from tubes stacked with coins inside the machine. Money Honey’sinnovation was to incorporate an electric hopper (developed for coin counting)which could hold much larger quantities of coins, making the payouts much morespectacular. In the UK, legislation in 1961 relaxed controls, permitting highpayout fruit machines under supervised conditions, effectively in separate‘over 18s’ areas.

Until the 1960s fruit machines were entirelymechanical.
The handle not only flicked round the reels but wound a clockworkmotor which times the braking of the reels and the payout release. Allfantastically ingenious. The coin tube where thecoins to be paid accumulate is also visible in the picture, below the reels tothe right .

The first electricmachines were electromechanical – the reels were powered by motors and brakedby solenoids. Pulling the handle no longer felt so satisfying, with theclockwork machines there was always the sense that the outcome could be affectedby the exact speed that the handle was pulled. In the 1980s theelectromechanical machines were in turn replaced by microprocessor machines, thereels driven and braked by stepper motors. In these machines, the microprocessorcontrols the exact stopping position of each reel.

With the older mechanical andelectromechanical machines, the positions the reels ended up in was fairlyrandom, so the percentage payout was simply an average of all the differentpossible combinations– but nowthe reels are driven by stepper motors, their final position is computercontrolled so its easy to tweak the software to maximise the addiction. Themicroprocessor is also used to control the spectacular lighting sequence - oftenhundreds of separate lamps - in today’s machines.