Three Dates for One Machine: Charles Fey's Liberty Bell and the Story Behind the BAR Symbol

San Francisco, somewhere in the last years of the nineteenth century. A mechanic named Charles Fey builds a coin machine with three reels, a lever and a coin slot. When three cracked Liberty Bells line up, the machine drops ten nickels into a tray on its own, with no attendant needed. That automatic payout is the idea every slot machine since has inherited. What nobody can quite agree on is the year it happened.

Three dates for one machine

Ask when the Liberty Bell was built and the sources split three ways.

The Wikipedia entry on slot machines hedges widely, placing Fey's simpler automatic mechanism "at some time between 1887 and 1895." The Fey family's own site gives 1894. The Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation, writing about Fey as one of the notable figures connected to the Colma cemetery, dates his Card Bell to 1898 and the Liberty Bell to 1899.

These are not small disagreements over a month. They span more than a decade, and each version gets repeated confidently elsewhere. The honest position is that the date is contested, and that the machine's influence does not depend on settling it. A story that needs one precise year to be true is usually a story that has been tidied up.

What the sources do agree on is the man. Fey was born in 1862, according to the family site, and emigrated at twenty three, first to New Jersey and then to San Francisco, where he worked on electrical equipment and telephones before turning to coin machines.

What the Liberty Bell actually did

The machine was simpler than its reputation. Three reels carried a small set of symbols: horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts and the cracked Liberty Bell. Three bells paid the top prize of fifty cents, ten nickels.

Earlier coin machines, including the five drum poker machine Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn produced in the 1890s, paid out in drinks or cigars handed over by the bartender, because the range of possible poker hands was too wide to pay mechanically. Fey's reduction to three reels and a handful of symbols made automatic cash payment mechanically possible. The mechanism mattered more than the theme.

No patent, and then everyone's copy

Fey never patented the Liberty Bell. According to the Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation, he could not, because gambling was technically illegal in California. Competitors noticed. The Mills Novelty Company of Chicago began manufacturing its own version in 1907.

The Foundation also records that only four of the more than one hundred Liberty Bells Fey built are known to survive, with the 1906 earthquake and fire destroying much of what was in San Francisco at the time. The original, in other words, was largely lost while the copies multiplied.

By 1909, San Francisco had roughly 3,300 slot machines before the city banned them, a figure the same Foundation reports. The machine had gone from a single workshop to a municipal problem within about a decade, whichever founding date you prefer.

Cherries, lemons and a stick of gum

The fruit that still covers slot reels arrived as a workaround. In 1910, Mills introduced the Operator Bell, which could be fitted with a gum vending attachment. Because the gum was fruit flavoured, the reels carried fruit: lemons, cherries, oranges and plums. The Fey family site describes these machines as a way around California's 1909 ban. A machine that dispensed gum could be presented as a vending machine rather than a gambling device.

The BAR symbol is where the record turns into legend. The standard account, repeated by Wikipedia and by the Fey family site, is that it began as a picture of a stick or label of Bell Fruit Gum. It is a plausible story and a well travelled one, but the sources that repeat it do not cite a patent drawing, a catalogue or a dated photograph. This site treats it as the commonly told explanation rather than an established fact.

What survives

The Liberty Bell's descendants are everywhere, and the family resemblance is closer than it looks. Bells, cherries and bars remain standard symbols on classic style slots more than a century later. The three reel layout survives as a deliberate retro format. Most of all, the automatic payout survives: the machine decides and pays without a person in the loop.

That last inheritance deserves an unromantic note. The point of paying automatically was to let a machine run unattended, taking coins all day. The fifty cent top prize was the visible part of the design; the steady margin on every other pull was the part that made the machines worth copying and, within a decade, worth banning. Nothing about the history of the Liberty Bell suggests it was built to be beaten.

Sources

Wikipedia, "Slot machine," for the 1887 to 1895 date range, the Sittman and Pitt machine, the Operator Bell's gum attachment and fruit symbols, and the Bell Fruit Gum account of the BAR symbol.

Wikipedia, "Liberty Bell (game)," for the reel symbols, the ten nickel top payout and the 1907 start of Mills manufacturing.

CharlesFey.com, "Liberty Bell Slot Machine," for Fey's 1862 birth, the 1894 date, the 1910 Operator Bell and the link between fruit machines and the 1909 California ban.

Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation, "The Slot Machine King of Cypress Lawn," for the 1898 and 1899 dates, the patent problem, the survival of four machines and the 1909 San Francisco figure.

Responsible Gambling

Online casino play in Canada is regulated by each province, with a legal age of 19 in most provinces and 18 in Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec. The fruit and bell symbols on a modern reel carry a century of nostalgia, but they sit on machines built on the same principle as Fey's: a steady margin on every spin. If play stops feeling like a choice, ConnexOntario offers free, confidential support at 1 866 531 2600, and every province runs its own support line.