The bell, the cherry and the BAR have been turning on reels for more than a century. Each one started out somewhere unexpected: an inventor’s workshop in San Francisco, a flavour of chewing gum and the label on a gum wrapper. Even the year it all began is disputed.
Their story takes in American inventors and manufacturers, an attempt to pass gaming machines off as vending machines, and two Acts of Parliament that shaped how Britain regulates them. It also explains why the same pictures still appear on screens today, long after mechanical reels gave way to microprocessors, and why Britain has its own name for the machines. Here is where each symbol came from, and what has changed behind it.
A bell from San Francisco
The three-reel machine is credited to Charles August Fey, a San Francisco inventor, but the date depends on the source. California’s official landmark listing and the Science Museum Group both give 1895. An SFO Museum exhibition dated his Liberty Bell machine to 1898, while his grandson Marshall Fey, who has written books on the machines’ history, has placed the first three-reel version in the late 1880s.
The Liberty Bell’s reels carried horseshoes, stars and playing-card symbols alongside a picture of Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell. The bell made such an impression that the machines became known simply as “Bells”, and SFO Museum credits the design with setting the standard for more than a million machines by other makers. Fey built them in a workshop at 406 Market Street from 1897 until the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed it.
Fruit, gum and a wrapper label
Fruit arrived in the first two decades of the 20th century. According to the Science Museum Group, many companies rebranded their machines as chewing-gum dispensers to get around the laws and taboos on gambling.
Marshall Fey dates a key step to 1910, when the Chicago-based Mills Novelty Company added a mechanism offering a piece of gum with every nickel played. Fruit symbols replaced the original card symbols to suggest the gum’s fruit flavours: cherry, orange, plum and lemon. The gum, he wrote, “was of low quality and generally not taken”.
The BAR has the most literal origin. Marshall Fey wrote that it was the gum wrapper label, and accounts drawing on his earlier book describe a picture of a stick of Bell-Fruit Gum on the reels.
| Symbol | Origin | When |
|---|---|---|
| Bell | Fey’s Liberty Bell | Late 1880s to 1898, by source |
| Cherry, orange, plum, lemon | Gum flavours | From about 1910 |
| BAR | Gum wrapper label | From about 1910 |
Why Britain says “fruit machine”
Those fruit symbols also gave Britain its everyday name for the machines. The Science Museum Group, whose Science Museum appears in this guide to London’s best museums, says “fruit machine” is the name that stuck in the UK, while Americans mostly say “slot machine” and Australians say “pokies”. Merriam-Webster labels “fruit machine” as British and dates its first known use to 1933.
The other nickname, “one-armed bandit”, comes from the single handle on the side of early mechanical machines, and Merriam-Webster dates it to 1934. The Science Museum Group’s collection includes a 1950s West German wall-mounted machine in that style. Its three reels of ten symbols each allow 1,000 possible combinations (10 × 10 × 10), the same arithmetic as on Fey’s Liberty Bell.
From the 1968 Act to the 2005 Act
In Britain, machines were given a part of the law to themselves. The Gaming Act 1968, which received Royal Assent on 25 October 1968, included a part headed “Gaming by Means of Machines”, covering the sale, supply and maintenance of machines and the premises where they could be used. The same Act set up a new body, the Gaming Board for Great Britain.
The Gambling Act 2005, which received Royal Assent on 7 April 2005, repealed the whole of the 1968 Act. It set up the Gambling Commission to regulate commercial gambling in Great Britain, and its Part 10 sorts gaming machines into four categories, A to D. According to GOV.UK, the Act came fully into force on 1 September 2007.
Old symbols on new screens
Pull-handle mechanical machines are now rarely found in casinos, according to the Science Museum Group, because modern machines use microprocessors to select the outcome. The group adds that digital versions of fruit machines are now on most gambling websites and apps.
Newer online games can keep the old set on purpose, with BARs, lemons, cherries, bells and lucky sevens on the reels. Fortune Games online slots, the slots section of a UK online casino, gathers game-by-game guides that run from classic three-reel sevens to Megaways titles, plus explainers of the terms found on a game’s help screen.
What has changed is what sits behind the pictures. Under the Gambling Commission’s technical standards for online gambling software, random number generation and game results must be “acceptably random”. However traditional the symbols look, every result is random and no strategy changes the odds.
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