Meanwhile, east of the Mississippi, the British betting fad had taken hold, and horse racing bloomed anew. Maryland’s Pimlico Racecourse opened in 1870, followed by Kentucky’s Churchill Downs in 1875—the homes of the Preakness and the Kentucky Derby. Bookmaking soon became almost as popular in New England as it was in Old England.
Farther south, in Florida, the “Faro King” of New York, John Morrissey, set about opening private “club houses” where non-resident Sarasota vacationers could play undisturbed. By 1871, he was grossing more than $250,000 a year, causing imitators to pop up all around the small city.
Morrissey’s success prompted Richard Canfield, the “Prince of Gamblers,” to set up shop, not only in Sarasota, but in New York, too. His Madison Square Club, modeled after the elegant casinos of Monte Carlo, opened in 1888 and soon grew into America’s top gambling spot. By the turn of the century, Canfield had become the wealthiest casino promoter in the country, worth more than $13 million.
In the 1880’s, a poker-playing passion infected the nation. It was followed by a brief interest in British pedestrianism. But little could prepare the American public for the next gambling sensation. It was taking shape in a San Francisco electrical shop in 1898—the slot machine.
Three German mechanics—Theodore Holtz, Gustav Schultze, and Charles Fey—developed a new wheel-mechanism based upon an 1891 poker machine that dispensed cigars to winners. Their invention was called “Horseshoes,” and it paid out two nickels (10¢) whenever one of ten horseshoes came up on a line out of 25 possible symbols. Fey later perfected the device with three wheels and called it the “Liberty Bell.”
By the time of the Great San Francisco Earthquake in 1906, the city was earning an annual six-figure tax income off revenues from thousands of installed “slot machines,” so-named for the orifice in which a nickel was inserted to trigger the reels. The machines were declared illegal in 1909, but by then they were a fixture in casinos across the country.
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