The History of Roulette

The History of Roulette

The history of Roulette started in 1655 in France. The father of Roulette is the famous mathematician, scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), responsible for important contributions to science as the scientific method and the mechanical calculator. Roulette was born by chance, like almost all great inventions, when Pascal tried to create an instrument of perpetual motion. Although he missed his attempt, Roulette has become an invention that it is still in our culture and casinos. After a while, it was discovered that the wheel could be used to play. No one used it before 1842. The original concept of Blaise Pascal changed when the French Francois and Louis Blanc added a 0 at the Roulette, which reached 37 numbers and then, through the 0, which give less chance to win for bet players and could motivate gambling establishment to adopt Roulette.

The roulette game was illegal in France. However, its popularity in Europe had grown enough for Francois Blanc who decided to create the first casino in Monte Carlo, where roulette is still “The Queen of Casino Games”.

In the nineteenth century, Roulette has crossed the Atlantic. In United States, the roulette has acquired a double 0 for 38 numbers. The history of Roulette varies, depends of the version: American and European versions, in U.S., sometimes double 0 is replaced by an eagle – but the rules of Roulette have not undergone significant changes.

The “kings” of Roulette

Like all bet games, Roulette has also been the target of scams. Joseph Jagger brought his dubious contribution to the history of Roulette in 1873, when he paid six employees of the casino in Monte Carlo to obtain information on the results of Roulette. Thus, he learned that a number could go out more often than others, and won around 450,000 francs until he was discovered. But jagger was not the only one: Charles Wells, player and cheater well known, won almost 2 million francs in 1891 by attacking (playing roulette) two casinos in Monte Carlo, and by winning 23 of 30 laps of Roulette. Fred Gilbert wrote a song about it, whose title is “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”. This is how this player entered in the history of the roulette.

The arrival of the digital age has created a world of possibilities, and the challenge was irresistible for Roulette players such as Edward O. Thorp and Claude Shannon of MIT, who, in 1955 created a mechanism that allowed them to predict the probability of roulette. 
During the ’70s, a group of students from the University of Santa Cruz, California, entitled Eudemons, had developed a small computer via a camera and an oscilloscope for increasing their chances to beat Roulette. They tested the invention at the casinos of Las Vegas and stopped playing only when the camera broke and one of the crew members was injured by electric waves. The group split after winning only 10,000 Euros, but they have proven that there is a scientific way to predict the trajectory of the small ball to its place of arrival.