Location-Thirty-nine
therefore that the manufacture and use of the three
reeler was largely maintained and increasingly
flourished during the lean post war years.
In 1948 the Buckley Manufacturing Company, who had
entered the slot machine field by revamping old Mills
machines during the war, launched a new machine , the
Criss Cross Bell. This machine incorporated a major
new feature which had previously been developed by
the company for use on their revamped models. lt was
the Tic Tac Toe , which as its name suggests made
provision for an extra automatic payout (of 18 coins) if
the three bar symbols appeared oc the reels regardless
of whether they were on the central win line. This
effectively added 12 more winning combinations to the
payout schedule and liberalised the machine , thus
making it more attractive to play. lts appeal also lay fn
its element of surprise , the player happily accepting a
payout when no obvious combination had been made ,
especially since only some of the combinations had
been listed on the award chart. The idea was an
immediate success , especially so in Nevada which at
that time was buying up machines wholesale . lt rapidly
became Buckley's most important trading area , so that
by the time of the Johnson Act the firm had become
firmly entrenched in Nevada and was little affected by
the law's implementation . The feature was of course
taken up by others. In the same year Jennings launched
the Standard Chief Tic Tac Toe Bell. Mills also brought
out a special over-and-under version of the Jewel Bell
which later became the 21 Bell , which featured instead
of bar symbols , the number seven .
MACHINE DESIGN
The rise of Nevada as a centre for gambling led to
changes in machine design . The earliest of these related
to the jackpot. The laws of the state placed no limit
upon the money that could be won from a slot machine
as long as that money was guaranteed and attainable .
To this end machines for the Nevada market were
made which by-passed the conventional automatically
loaded jackpot, enabling them to be either hand
loaded , or to offer sums of money much vaster than any
machine was able to pay out automatically, in which
case the lucky player was paid in cash by the house. The
change in design of the Pace machines of the late 40s is
an instance of this , whereby the traditional twin jackpot
window was dropped in favour of the handloaded
Jumbo Jak-Pot or Guaranteed Jak-Pot windows .
Another instance of how the Nevada market affected
machine design was the introduction by Ace ( one of the
successors of the Pace Manufacturing Company) in the
early 1950s of the front opening cabinet which
facilitated the cleaning and servicing of a machine by
the location. Up until that time access to the
mechanism was solely by means of the back which in
many instances necessitated moving the machine . What
in many respects was a minor innovation led in the long
run to radical changes in the machine's design.
As noted earlier, the response of the industry when
faced with hard times was to seek solutions which
would enable the machines to be used despite the
laws made against them . Although much depleted in
1947 MILLS JEWEL BELL
numbers, the 1950s were to prove no exception to this
rule for manufacturers. This time however the laws
formulated were so strictly worded , and so stringently
applied that the ploys of earlier years proved largely
ineffectual.
In 1953 Taylor and Company of Chicago, an electrical
components manufacturing firm , launched a remote
control electrical unit for use on converted slot
machines. The device's success lay in its questioning of
the legal definition of what constituted a coin-operated
gambling machine . The unit was in fact an updated
version of an earlier ploy, which as already noted had
been tried out some 30 years earlier by such companies
as Eljay in England. If no coin was directly required to
play a machine and no money was directly forthcoming
from the machine , then under the strict letter of the law
it was not a coin-operated gambling device. ln practice
an operator would retain control of the unit . An
intending player would pay him for whatever number
of plays he wished . The operator would then work the
unit so that it released the handle on the machine for
the desired number of plays. The machine could then
be operated in the normal manner. If the player won ,
the operator would pay out (under the counter). No
coin entered or left the machine , on the front of which
invariably appeared the words " For Amusement
Only" . In practice the unit had only a marginal success,
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