Roulette Timeline
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1655 1842 1800’s 1900s 1990s
Blaise Pascal Zero added European Roulette Birth of Roulette moves
invents roulette to European migrates to US American Roulette online
wheel roulette wheel
Roulette – The Early Days
If you want an exact date that someone woke up and said: “Today I’m going to discover the game of roulette”, you’ll be disappointed. Some people say that the game existed in some shape or form throughout history. Let’s face it, when you combine simple elements like a wheel and numbers, and you add man’s natural competitive drive, you’ve got a winning combination. As such, it is quite possible that those tales of Roman chariot drivers playing a gambling game with their wheels, or ancient monks whiling away their winters playing a form of roulette, are true.
What we know for sure, however, is that the esteemed French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, obsessed with his desire to create a perpetual motion device, thought up the roulette wheel, similar to what we know today, and created it in 1655. But while Pascal was dreaming about maths, others were eyeing this nifty little contraption and were seeing the potential dollar signs emanating from it, even before dollars existed!
For two hundred years or so, the roulette wheel was used for entertainment in some shape or form, and it was only in 1842 that two French brothers, Louis and Francois Blanc, decided that they would add a zero, bringing the numbers to 37 on the wheel. This deliberate increase of the house odds was the sign of things to come for the game of roulette. Louis Blanc established some of the first casinos in Monte Carlo and introduced the who’s who of European society to the King of Casino Games – European roulette!
European Roulette – a Migrating Game
Roulette was one of Europe’s best kept little secrets for a few hundred years, but like some of the most famous inventions in the world, it was bound to break down borders and migrate to other lands. As such, roulette was brought across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States some time during the 1800s, and like everything in the big ol’ US of A took on bigger proportions than its classic European cousin. American casinos wanted to squeeze that extra bit out of gamblers and added the double zero which pushed the house edge up considerably. American roulette became a permanent fixture in US casinos and is still hugely popular today.
Virtual Migration of European Roulette
In the 1990s, roulette made another migration, this time to the world of cyberspace. This virtual passage was made possible by the fact that software companies were creating software that was able to support roulette on the internet. Online roulette became an instant, overnight success, allowing players to try out both European Roulette and American Roulette off multiple platforms, using realistic graphics, incredible sound features and the feeling of being right in a live casino – all from the comfort of the player’s own home. If you look at the incredible journey that roulette has made (think ancient Romans to 3D Roulette), you can’t help but be amazed that this incredible game is still considered one of the most popular around.
