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 confiden...