Shuffling Machine - Early Mechanical Card Shufflers

Early Mechanical Card Shufflers

Patents regarding card shuffling devices started to appear in the United States around the end of the 19th century. It is unclear whether these devices were converted to commercial products or were discarded. These machines were often complex with many mechanical parts to achieve card retrieval, shuffling and distribution with pseudo-randomness.

In 1878, Henry Ash proposed an apparatus to shuffle cards. His device was a box with an open top where the operator would place the deck. The operator would then slightly shake the box to make the cards fall through a comb at the bottom of the box. About half of the cards would fall into the lower compartment while the rest was still in the upper compartment. The operator would take these upper cards, pack them together and do the same with the lower cards. The two packs would be placed upon each other to form a new deck and the operation could be repeated for better shuffling.

In 1887, Silvanus Tingley and Charles Stetson patented their "card shuffling apparatus". The device was composed of two card-holding boxes where the packs were held by springs. The device simulated a riffle shuffling by extracting the cards through a slot at the bottom of each box and placing them in a pile in the middle. The operator would turn a crank which was connected to gears and finally disks covered with rubber that were in contact with cards. This feeding mechanism ensured that the final stack was composed of cards "randomly" coming from the left or right chamber. The main difference with the next machines is that only one card would be ejected from a box during one turn.

In 1892, William H. Ranney filled a patent for a "card shuffling and dealing mechanism". The apparatus was basically an inclined box which was fixed to the border of the playing table. The cards were inserted from the top of the case and were trapped inside a receptacle hold by a lever. The operator would turn a crank which would slowly lower the bottom wall of the inclined receptacle. At this point, the device relied upon the friction force between the cards to achieve some kind of randomness. One card would start to slide as a result of the steepness and would attract a few cards with it. The number of cards being released at each turn would typically vary between one and five cards. The cards fell into another receptacle and the operator would turn the whole device to distribute the cards to another player. This rotation activated a roller which would distribute the bottom card out of the box. One year later, William Ranney proposed another version of his device where the original deck was split in half and cards would fall from one or both halves at once.

In 1897, two brothers, the Crooks, proposed a more complex machine which was similar to a slot machine displaying five cards. This device did not distribute cards to players but was just displaying a random sequence of cards. However, it used a shuffling mechanism that relied upon a rotating triangular frame where each side contained the same device. Only one mechanical side could operate and display cards at a moment and the operator would rotate the whole drum to perform another shuffling. A shuffling box would be split into five compartments using what they called "partition fingers". A complex pins mechanism would then mix the cards between the compartments and the new result would be displayed.

John Bowen proposed in 1899 a compact "card shuffling machine" where the unshuffled pack was enclosed between two horizontal plates. The principle of this apparatus was similar to Tingley and Stetson's machine. The top plate could move and was called the follower, the bottom plate was fixed. The operator would press the deck using a vertical handle which was connected to the follower, and he would turn a crank that activated two rollers which were above and under the deck. In front of the deck, a bar would block most cards except those on top of the pack as well as those at the bottom. The rollers were pressing against the cards and with their respective rotation, would throw them into a receptacle. At each step, cards could come from the top or the bottom of the deck and the number of cards which were ejected was not constant. Variable friction between the rollers and the cards themselves ensured some randomness as in Ranney's machine.

Fred Rollings in 189] invented a device with a rotating table where cards were spread around the center using a detent with variable pressure. In 1901, Benjamin Bellows filled a patent for his device which used "gravity alone for all movements of the cards" by dividing guiding them through moving compartments. Various mechanisms were proposed during the following years with different combinations of rollers, card-holding boxes, combs and pins systems. Most of these machines were manually run by turning a crank which would activate the inner gears and rollers. Randomness could be improved by increasing the number of shuffling turns performed by the operators or by increasing the number of boxes, combs or partitioning chambers in the machines. Some devices were simple boxes with combs that would simulate a manual shuffling like riffle shuffling. In 1925, Charles and William Gunzelmann filed a patent for a simple rhombus-shaped apparatus where the cards were inserted in an upper chamber. Shaking the device would make the cards fall into a lower compartment; the shuffling was ensured by two small wings in the middle of the box that would distribute the cards. The operator would then turn the box upside down and repeat the operation. A glass windows permitted to see that all cards had fallen into the compartment.