Marshall Fey, grandson of Charles Fey, who invented the first three-reel slot machine in 1889 has written and updated the quintessential book on the subject, “Slot Machines-A Pictorial History of the First 100 years”, with a Price Guide. A collector would pay over $60,000 for an authentic “first” Liberty Bell machine” says Fey. A history of Slot Machines with Marshall Fey,John Burke,John Davis,Claire Carter and Arden Myrin. Filmed live from the FX Collectable's Studio and at the Lib. On the other hand, Slot Machines: A History of the First 100 Years by Charles Fey's grandson Marshall Fey gives an earlier date, although still later than Scarne's, of 1898 for its invention. The first of these machines had reel strips with pictures of playing cards on them instead of just suit symbols; however, changing the reel strips.
The Fey brothers’ slot machine heritage brought them to town, and they built on that heritage. Now it may be lost.
There was no land rush when the Fey brothers threw open the doors of the Liberty Belle on Nov. 20, 1958.
“On our first day, we did twenty-eight dollars and forty eight cents,” says Marshall Fey, drawing out the amount with his voice. “I’d say we probably had 30 drop in and drop out to see what the place looked like.”
The place was different then. The building was much smaller, the big bar wasn’t present (the Feys advertised a “rolling bar,” but Marshall cannot remember today what that was), and there was no food. The $28.48 came entirely from the bar, though it didn’t count whatever take there was from 10 slot machines. A reference book on Reno says the Liberty Belle had a 21 table, but Marshall says, in fact, they were turned down for the license. The place was open from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m., compared to today’s 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. (10 on weekends).
Within weeks of opening night, the Feys were approached about adding food.
“And the way we got in the restaurant business is the maitre’d of the [Mapes] Sky Room—they closed down, so he phoned us up and wanted to know if he could run the kitchen, and we said, ‘Sure.’ So he ran it for a while, and it didn’t do very well. I think the top night was 28 dinners. And then he got the chef from the Christmas Tree to take it over. He did a lot better.” Then that chef failed to appear for work on Labor Day, whereupon the Feys stopped contracting the restaurant out and ran it themselves.
When the Liberty Belle opened, its owners included the instruction “Go 5 Minutes South” in their advertising. Today a five-minute drive from downtown will get a driver about five blocks, but in those days, there were only a couple of stoplights or stop signs on South Virginia Street, and the street could be driven almost without interruption. (And the month the saloon opened, there was a complaint from one resident about the “asinine” stop sign at Virginia and Hash Lane, now McCarran Boulevard.) Five minutes was quite a distance from downtown, though it was certainly not isolated out there. Moana Lane, with its hot springs, had long been a Reno hot spot, and the Big Hat at the corner of Moana and Virginia had been a fine dinner house since 1947.
But it was a rural setting. The Anderson/Sparks ranch house was within sight of the Liberty Belle, trees lined Virginia Street, and boarding houses cum “guest ranches,” where divorcees established their residences, sat among many of the trees. (A sign in the Liberty Belle calls the property the “site of Reno’s first settlement,” but a historian says this isn’t established by research.)
In the years after opening night, the city crept south, to, around, and past the saloon. Originally licensed by the county, it moved into the city. A significant benchmark came on July 27, 1959. Reno voters approved bonds for the construction of an auditorium downtown and a convention center south of town. The convention hall was built behind the Liberty Belle.
In 1967, the Feys expanded the building and started staging melodramas. The Drunkard was the first. They were popular for a while. When the audiences tapered off, the dining area was expanded into the theatre space.
The Feys ended up in Reno because of their heritage. They had been running a Gay ‘90s-themed beer joint in San Mateo called the Swinging Door. Their father, who held 21 patents on arcade devices, ran Playland at the Beach, and the saloon was a part of it. When the lease was up, they looked around for somewhere to go. Their grandfather, Charles Fey, had invented the slot machine, and they owned one of his old slots, which were technically illegal in California. They came to where slots were legal.
In Reno, the Feys opened the Liberty Belle in the former Li’l Red Barn, a bar and restaurant that had some gambling. The new place was named in honor of one of Charles Fey’s slots.
In time, the place grew to be one of those fixtures of the community that so few restaurants become. In 2003 when the Liberty Belle was in a face-off with the convention center, which wanted to acquire the saloon and tear it down, the Reno Gazette-Journal, normally the champion of the overdog, pointed out that officialdom never seems to want to demolish transient restaurants; it’s the ones that the community embraces—like Columbo’s, Mimi’s Hideaway and the Liberty Belle—that fall under the wrecking ball.
Many of those who have lived in the valley for a few years have stories of the Liberty Belle. Some tell of their first time at the Belle, some of their first beer after turning 21. That warm connection is why the Good Old Days Club likes meeting there. The Kiwanis and the Nevada Judicial Historical Society meet there, too. (Marshall let me use the meeting room for a memorial gathering for my father, who loved the place, and Marshall himself attended.)
The first advertising offered customers a saloon and museum, and the museum then was just the one antique slot plus some old arcade machines. “We weren’t basically a slot museum then,” Marshall says. Today’s display heavily emphasizes the slots. As the years passed, Marshall expanded the museum, collecting one machine after another, some of them manufactured by Charles Fey Manufacturing, the company that once operated at 1885 Mission St. in San Francisco. Marshall has no idea how much he has spent acquiring the collection over the years. But many of his purchases were made before inflated prices for collectibles drove ordinary people out of the market. Of today’s values on his machines, he says, “We had no idea they were going to go up the way they did.” He gestures to one row of six slot machines. They cost him $100.
Marshall says preserving the collection was made doubtful in part because “the second generation doesn’t really have much enthusiasm for it. Oh, they’re proud that their ancestor invented it.” But that’s not the same as taking on the massive job of holding the collection together. The saloon is closing because fire officials require a different kitchen fire prevention system be installed. The Feys sold the water rights and raised $69,000 to pay the $50,000 tab for the new system. But the building also needed a new roof, and the family wanted to call it quits.
In a development that reminds some of the breakup and auction of the cream of the Harrah’s Automobile Collection, the Fey machines will all be auctioned off in a July 8 sale. Marshall says he feels “terrible” about the impending breakup of the collection he spent decades building. “I was hoping there’d be a national museum for slots. We have the best slot collection on public display.”
And out of public display. The stuff on the restaurant floor is only part of the collection. In storage upstairs are additional machines—slots, pinballs, flip card viewers, a juke box.
For the casino industry, it seems like a safe bet that a slot-machine museum could enhance respectability, emphasize heritage and attract customers. Unless such a benefactor emerges soon, though, in 140 days, the collection that took a generation to assemble will be gone.
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The story of the slot machine is one of intrigue, theft, controversy, and murder. Okay, not murder, but everything else. And it starts in Bavaria….
Augustinus Charles Fey was the youngest of sixteen children born in 1862 in the small village of Vohringen, Bavaria which sits at the edge of the Alps. Early on, he displayed an interest in mechanics, following his brothers’ footsteps and working in a farm tool factory in Munich. At fifteen, August hit the road (apparently fearful of his strict father and not wanting to serve in the military) and walked across Europe. He stopped in France for about three years, working as an intercom equipment manufacturer, and then made his way to a British shipyard (approximately 750 miles and an English channel away from home), where he settled down for five years as a nautical instrument maker.
Several years before, August’s uncle (his mother’s brother) had moved to and settled in New Jersey. The family received letters from him talking of fortune and the good life America provided. So, August saved his money and made the pilgrimage to the United States. He arrived in New Jersey and lived with his uncle’s family in Hoboken (the birth place of baseball), but quickly made the decision to try his hand out west in the “lawless” town of San Francisco. He arrived there approximately in 1884/1885 at around 23 years old, right when the city was attempting to change itself, for better and worse.
In 2013, maps of San Francisco were uncovered from the late 19th century. These maps showed numerous gambling halls, opium dens, and brothels dotting the city, with each vice-ridden location color-coded on the maps. Despite this, little was done at this time by the local government and police force about these illegal establishments.
In this environment, Fey used his skills as a mechanic and found a job at California Electric Works (later Western Electric, which went defunct in 1995). He worked as an instrument maker and while doing this befriended a German foreman, Theodore Holtz, who will come into this story again later. It was also about this time that he met Marie Christine Volkmar, the daughter of a cigar shop owner, with whom he fell in love with.
Unfortunately, he contracted consumption, aka tuberculosis (see: Why Tuberculosis was Called Consumption), and hit the road again, this time for warmer weather in Mexico. While there, his health did not improve, so he returned to San Fran, thinking if he was going to die, it might as well be near the woman he loved. He miraculously got better (potentially due to the controversial use of creosote, obtained through the distillation of tar) and married Marie in 1889. They would go on to have four children together. To top off the metamorphosis going on in his life, August Charles Fey changed his name to Charles Fey, reportedly because he hated being called “Gus.”
At this point, Fey began tinkering with creating and inventing his own mechanical devices. Always a fan of making money, he frequented the gambling halls of San Francisco and noticed the so-called “nickel-in-the-slot” machines that were rapidly becoming popular. These machines were much closer to vending machines than to what we think of slot machines today, dispensing cigars or drink tickets. These also usually required a human, the cigar shop owner or barkeep, to give you your prize. The most popular ones were the poker machines that would actually flip real playing cards on five reels, revealing the hand. The better the hand, the more drink/cigar tickets you earned. These types of machines were so ubiquitous that a San Francisco Daily News headline noted, “Fiveteen Hundred Swindling Machines in One City!”
In 1893, Fey thought he could make a better gambling machine. His work friend Theodore Holtz introduced him to another German who was working at California Electric Works, Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Schultze. On August 8, 1893, Schultze had patented his own “coin-controlled apparatus,” called the “Horseshoe.” This was the first US patent issued for a gambling machine and was the first to somewhat resemble what we now know as a modern slot machine. In fact, some historians have argued that Schultz, not Fey, should be the one known as the “Thomas Edison of slot machines.” We will come back to that later. Either way, Fey was impressed and “inspired” by the Horseshoe and went to work on his own coin-controlled apparatus.
In 1894, Fey designed a version of the Horseshoe, quite simply the same machine, but with a better mechanical reel, and asked Holtz to be his equal business partner (and not Schultz.) Holtz agreed and they both quit their jobs at California Electric, setting up shop as “Holtz and Fey Electric Works” at 39 Stevenson Street. Purposefully, they positioned their shop close to Schultz’s shop, who had also quit his job to make gambling machines. This should have set up a rivalry, except for the fact that Holtz and Fey were also selling leftover parts to Schultz, presumably because Schultz had no clue that they were also making gambling machines and had essentially stolen his idea.
In any event, in the basement of his house in 1895, Fey completed his next mechanical wonder, an even more modified version of the Horseshoe he called the “4-11-44” in homage to a popular lottery game at the time called “Policy,” in which the rare winning sequence was 4-11-44.
This machine is one of the reasons so many give Fey the credit for inventing the slot machine. It was a three-disc floor machine and was unlike any other ever created because instead of spitting out tokens or slips, it had the ability to dispense actual coins. They put it in a local San Francisco saloon and it was a hit and a huge money maker. Fey and Holtz went to work producing more, but before they got very far, Fey, once again, went packing.
Marshall Fey Slot Machines List
Fey sold his share of his company with Holtz to start his own company, Charles Fey & Company. (Holtz also founded his own company and called it “Novelty Machine Works”.)
In 1897, Fey further staked his claim as the “Thomas Edison of slot machines,” when he devised the Card Bell slot machine, a “three-reel, staggered-stop machine with automatic payout.” Essentially, what it did was stagger the stops – first one reel, then the second, and then the third – just like modern slot machines, creating suspense, drama, and excitement. At first, he used playing card symbols, but two years later, he replaced them with stars and bells and called it the “Liberty Bell” slot machine. With ten symbols on each reel and ten stops, it allowed for numerous combinations. It was unlike anything else on the market, including Schultz’s machines.
Marshall Fey Slot Machines Jackpot
It should be noted here that, technically, slot machines at this time were illegal (though, most law officials rarely policed them). As such, even though Schultz was awarded a patent in 1893 for his machine, when he tried to sue Holtz (he did name several other defendants in his documents, including Fey, but Holtz was the main defendant), the courts ruled that the patent didn’t protect him because a gambling machine was illegal. Because of this, the gambling and slot machine industry, from then on, was a bit like the wild wild west – ideas, designs, and concepts were stolen right and left.
As for Fey, he never patented any of his machines nor sold or leased them. He would operate them himself by making agreements with the proprietors (bars, cigar shops, etc.) for a 50/50 split of the profits.
In the end, Fey’s machines were a hit and became the “the largest slot operation in the country during the early 1900s.”
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Bonus Facts:
- In 1906, one of Fey’s machines went missing from a Powell Street saloon. It later turned up at the Chicago factory of the Mills Novelty Company, one of Fey’s major competitors. They had pulled it apart, to see why it was making more money than any of their machines. They figured out that, due to only three symbols being visible to the player, the suspense created enticed more “customers.” So, they created their own slot machine – calling it the Mills Liberty Bell slots. Yeah, not even really changing the name. Yet Fey could do nothing – he never patented it and even if he did, the courts would rule that they couldn’t protect it anyway.
- In 2006, the Nevada State Museum acquired many of Fey’s old slot machines, photographs, and memorabilia from his grandsons. They were previously at the Liberty Belle Restaurant and Saloon in Reno, before the establishment closed. Buying it at under appraised value, the collection is “one of the finest slot machine collections in the world.”
- Around the time Fey was arriving in San Francisco, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was enacted, curtailing Chinese immigration tremendously in San Fran, from 40,000 people arriving in the city in 1881 to ten (yup, just ten) in 1887.
- Image via Vlada Z / Shutterstock.com
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