A Timeline of Roulette History
Origins of Roulette History
The tale of roulette history begins in France in 1655. The man responsible for the creation of the roulette wheel is famed mathematician Blaise Pascal. He made numerous contributions to mathematics, and is still one of history’s most revered mathematical figures. Pascal’s triangle is still taught in high schools around the world. There is a unit of atmospheric pressure named after Pascal. His is also the name given to one of the more popular computer programming languages.
Blaise Pascal enters gambling and roulette history in the year 1655. The roulette wheel is invented as a byproduct in his attempts to create a perpetual motion device. While his perpetual motion device will never come to fruition, roulette will live on to the present day and beyond.
Roulette’s gambling potential was spotted early on. For the first nearly two centuries of its history the roulette wheel remains little changed from the original basic design created by Pascal. Then in 1842 two Frenchmen, Francois and Louis Blanc add a 0 to the numbers of the roulette wheel. There are now 37 numbers on the roulette, ranging from 0 to 36. Adding the 0 increases the house odds of winning.
There is a tale that these two Frenchmen struck a deal with the devil in exchange for the secrets of the roulette. This tale is partly inspired by the fact that if you add up all of the numbers to 36 you receive a sum of “666,” the number of the beast.
At the time that they made this addition to the roulette wheel gambling was outlawed in France. This did not stop the popularity of roulette from spreading across Europe. Francois Blanc himself established the first casinos in Monte Carlo, where roulette would become “King of Casino Games.”
Sometime during the 1800’s roulette also traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. In the United States a double 0 is added for an even 38 numbers on the wheel. Sometimes in the US the 00 is replaced with an American Eagle. The development of roulette varies slightly between the American and European versions.
Famous Players in Roulette History
With the roulette wheel now firmly established and fixed into the gambling world, gamblers began to try to find the secrets of the game. Roulette history was made by one famous roulette player, Joseph Jagger. In 1873 he hired 6 clerks to record the outcomes of the roulette wheels at the Beaux-Arts Casino in Monte Carlo. Using this information he found that one number would come up more than any of the others and won $450,000 before management caught on.
In 1891 a gambler and con man, Charles Wells, also broke the bank at Monte Carlo. In two visits to the casinos of Monte Carlo he won over two million Francs, an incredible sum for the time. At one point he had won 23 out of 30 spins. His exploits were popularized in song by Fred Gilbert in “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”
With the dawn of the computer age in the 20th century a new breed of roulette players attempted to break the odds. In 1955 Edward O. Thorp and Claude Shannon of M.I.T. work to create a device that will allow them to predict the odds of roulette.
In the 1970’s a group of graduate students from the University of California Santa Cruz calling themselves the Eudaemons work to create a device to increase their odds of winning at roulette. Their name comes from the philosophy of eudaimonism.
By 1978 their device, a small computer, worked. They took the system to Las Vegas, where they found their device was successful. Average profits were 44% on the dollar. However experiments came to an end when the insulation on the device failed and one of the Eudaemons burned a hole in her skin. The group disbanded shortly thereafter, although their device had earned them winnings of about $10,000.
In the early 1990’s Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo studied the roulette wheels at the Casino de Madrid in Spain. Using a computer model he determined which numbers would be hit the most often and used this information to win over a million dollars in a period of several years. Eventually his actions were caught on by the casino who brought him to court, but the court ruled in his favor.
Roulette history is now over 3 and a half centuries old. From its humble beginnings as a side project of a mathematician attempting to build a perpetual motion device roulette is now perhaps the most popular casino game in the world. It is unlikely that roulette’s popularity will ever die.
