The History of Roulette

The story of roulette started at France in 1655. The person responsible for the introduction of roulette wheel is the celebrated mathematician Blaise Pascal. He created numerous inventions on mathematics, and still considered as one of most reputable mathematical figures. You may notice that Pascal’s triangle is currently still taught at high schools around the globe. An atmospheric pressure unit and a popular programming language also named after him.

He unwittingly entered the gambling world at 1655, when roulette accidentally created, as he tried to develop an exotic device that is known as the perpetual motion device. Although the perpetual motion device would never come to fruition, the roulette wheel would live on today and beyond.

The potential of Roulette gambling was spotted quickly. For the first 200 years of its history the roulette gambling remains relatively unchanged from the basic design crafted by Pascal. Finally in 1842 a couple of Frenchmen, Louis and Francois Blanc added a zero to the numbers in the roulette wheel. With 37 numbers on the roulette wheel, ranging from 0 to 36, the house has higher odds of winning.

There was a tale that these both Frenchmen struck an evil deal with the Prince of Darkness himself in exchange for the roulette secrets. The tale was partly inspired by an interesting fact that if all of the numbers from 1 to 36 are added up you will receive a sum of “666”, or the number of the beast.

When they made that addition on the roulette wheel, gambling was already outlawed in France. However, this did not stop the fame of roulette from propagating across Europe. It was Francois Blanc himself who established the first Monte Carlo casino, where roulette game would eventually become a dominant casino game.

In the 1800′s roulette also journeyed across the Atlantic to the United States. In the U.S. a double zero is added for a total of 38 numbers on the Roulette wheel. Occasionally in the US the double zero (00) is replaced with the American Eagle. The roulette development varies a little between the European and American versions.

After roulette wheel now firmly developed and fixed steadily into the gambling world, casino visitors began to try to come up with the secrets of the game. Roulette experiment was made by a famous roulette gambler, Joseph Jagger. In 1873 he employed six clerks to write the results of the roulette wheels in a Monte Carlo casino. With this information he discovered that a number would surface more than other numbers and he won over $400,000 before finally the casino management caught on.

At 1891 a con man and gambler, Charles Wells, successfully broke the bank at Monte Carlo. In a couple of visits to the Monte Carlo casinos he snatched over two million Francs, an overwhelming sum for the time. At one moment he had won twenty-three out of thirty spins.
After the dawn of the information age in the twentieth century a newfangled breed of roulette players set about to break the odds. At 1955 Claude Shannon and Edward O. Thorp of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) worked to create a specialized device to predict the probability of roulette wheel.

At the 1970′s a team of graduate students in the University of California Santa Cruz also known as the Eudaemons worked to develop a device for improving the likelihood of winning in roulette. The name comes from the eudaimonism philosophy. In 1978 the device, a small-sized computer, worked. They brought the computer to Las Vegas, where they discovered that their device was highly successful. The average profit was 44% for each dollar. Even so the experiment came to an abrupt end when an insulation on the machine failed and a Eudaemon burned a painful hole in her skin. The team dissolved shortly thereafter, Even though their machine had earned them a winning of about $10,000.

In early 90′s Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo analyzed the roulette wheels in the Casino de Madrid at Spain. Employing a computer model he found out which numbers would come out most frequently and used this idea to win over one million dollars in just several years. Finally his actions were discovered by the casino management and brought him to court, however the court ruled in his favor.

The history of roulette spans for about 350 years. From a humble beginning as an unexpected product of a mathematician seeking to build the perpetual motion device, roulette is now arguably the most popular game in casino.