Casino floors have always been full of habits that look like tradition. Men once reached for a jacket before walking in. Old slot cabinets rang a bell, coins rattled into metal trays, and blackjack dealers still clap once before stepping away from a table.
Plenty of those customs made it onto phones and live-streamed tables, usually in a new shape. Others vanished so thoroughly that you now find them in museum loans, auction records and the display cases of people who collect old Las Vegas.
Age and charm had little to do with which ones lasted. The customs that made the trip were doing a job, most often proving that something had really happened. The ones left behind were largely costume.
The Jacket Rule Was Looser Than The Photographs
Old pictures of Las Vegas showrooms, full of dinner jackets and cocktail dresses, gave the city a dress code it mostly never enforced. A reader thread on the Classic Las Vegas history site treats the idea that men needed a tie to enter a casino as a myth, and points out that many of those photographs came from special events where dressing up was expected.
One longtime resident, who moved to town in 1943 and left in 1994, remembered the dress code as “come as you are.” Only a few fancier rooms, such as the one at the top of the Desert Inn, required a tie, and they supplied one to any man who arrived without it.
The same thread dates the slide to the 1970s, when dressing for dinner was fading and Levi’s were catching on. Monaco held out longer. The Casino de Monte-Carlo, whose building was completed in 1863, still tightens its dress rules as the evening goes on.
None of it ever touched a game. A tie never changed how a card fell or what a machine paid. The dress code sorted people inside a room, and a phone has no room to sort, which leaves the jacket as the one ritual here with no online form at all.
Charles Fey Put A Working Bell In The Cabinet
The bell started out as hardware. Charles Fey, a Bavarian-born mechanic who reached San Francisco in 1885, built the Liberty Bell as a three-reel machine that paid its own winners, and the Museum of the Game’s entry for Fey’s Liberty Bell dates the model to 1899.
That automatic payout was the point. Many earlier coin machines in saloons and cigar stores could not pay anything back, so a barkeeper or the owner settled each win, often with a trade check good for a cigar or a drink. Fey’s machine settled the win itself and rang a bell when it did, so everyone in the saloon heard it pay.
Fey guarded the design by never selling it. The Immigrant Entrepreneurship project’s biography of him records that he placed his machines in saloons, serviced them himself, split the revenue 50/50 with the owners and fitted a detecting pin to reject fake nickels. His son Edmund recalled a 1905 burglary in which a thief took just two things from a saloon, a bartender’s apron and a Liberty Bell.
The earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906 destroyed Fey’s Market Street factory, and by 1907 Herbert Mills was selling a near replica in Chicago. The design had already settled what a slot machine was, though. The trade kept calling them bell-type machines until the electronic age.
Money Honey Made The Payout Loud
Bally changed the next part of the ritual in November 1963, when it brought Money Honey to Las Vegas casinos. Frank Legato’s 75th-anniversary history of Bally, published by Casino Player, calls it the first electromechanical slot built for casinos and the first with a payout hopper, a motorized reserve that held 3,000 dimes and dropped six of them a second.
Before the hopper, coin tubes capped a machine’s payout at perhaps $30 in dimes, and anything bigger meant a hand pay. After it, far more wins poured straight out of the cabinet, and the sound of metal hitting a tray became the sound of winning.
The coins began to disappear a generation later. IGT announced in September 2000 that its EZ Pay ticket system had finished a field trial at the Fiesta Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and barcoded paper tickets gradually took over from buckets of quarters.
The noise outlived the coins. By April 2010 the Las Vegas Sun was describing modern slot floors as a rumble of recorded sounds and reporting that coin-operated machines had mostly been phased out of American casinos.
Each step moved the job of paying a winner somewhere new:
| Payout Method | Dated To | How The Win Was Paid | What Announced It |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saloon Trade Checks | 1890s | Staff handed over a check for cigars or drinks | The person paying |
| Liberty Bell Payout | 1899 | The machine dropped nickels | A bell inside the cabinet |
| Money Honey Hopper | November 1963 | A motor fed out dimes, six a second | Coins striking a metal tray |
| EZ Pay Ticket | 2000 field trial | A printer issued a barcoded ticket | Recorded sound effects |
Only the last row is pure theater. The clatter had been a by-product of paying someone, and once a ticket did the paying, casinos kept the sound as a cue rather than a consequence. Online slots play their win sounds through a phone speaker, where nothing falls anywhere.
A Clay Chip Is Money With An Expiration Date
A casino chip is the most practical object on the floor. The standard size is about 39mm across, and a good clay composite chip carries edge spots set into the material rather than painted on, which makes a convincing copy hard to produce. A chip works as money in one building, and that building decides how long it stays money.
The Tropicana in Las Vegas showed how literal that is when it closed in 2024. The casino stopped issuing chips on April 2, and KTNV reported that Tropicana chips could be redeemed at the OYO Las Vegas cage only through July 31, 2024. Even its paper slot vouchers carried a printed expiration date.
Slot floors had started turning money into data long before phones did. Legato’s history credits Bally’s
