Who Invented Roulette? The Wheel's Story From Paris to Monte Carlo

No one person invented roulette. The game came together in France during the eighteenth century, stitched out of older wheel and board games, and it was a fixture of the Paris gaming rooms by the 1790s. The popular claim that Blaise Pascal created it while trying to build a perpetual motion machine is a legend without a document behind it. What can be followed with far more confidence is how the wheel changed afterwards: one zero in the German spa towns, two zeros in America, and a long reign at Monte Carlo.

The Pascal legend

Pascal, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher, did foundational work on probability, which is probably why his name became attached to a spinning-wheel game of chance. The usual version of the tale has him tinkering with a device meant to turn forever and stumbling on the shape of the roulette wheel instead. No source from his lifetime supports it. The French word roulette simply means "little wheel", and it was used for gadgets and pastimes of several kinds before it settled on the casino game.

The games that came first

Historians of gaming tend to treat roulette as a merger rather than a single invention, with two older families of games each supplying a piece:

• Roly-poly and E.O. — English wheel games of the eighteenth century in which a ball settled into a pocket. In E.O. (short for "even-odd") the pockets were marked E or O, and a couple of them were reserved for the bank.
• Biribi — an Italian game played on a board of numbered squares, with the winning number drawn from a bag rather than spun.

Roulette joined the wheel and ball of the English games to the numbered layout of biribi. The house advantage came from the same trick E.O. used: a few pockets that belonged to nobody but the bank.

Paris in the 1790s

By the end of the eighteenth century, roulette was being played in the gambling rooms clustered around the Palais-Royal in Paris. Early French descriptions already show a wheel with two house pockets, a zero and a double zero, and a staking layout that a modern player would recognise: single numbers, red or black, odd or even, high or low. When the city's public gaming houses were closed in the 1830s, operators looked elsewhere for customers.

One zero: the Blanc brothers

They found them in the spa towns of the German states, where wealthy visitors came to take the waters. In 1843 François and Louis Blanc opened their casino at Bad Homburg with a wheel carrying a single zero. Removing the double zero roughly halved the bank's built-in margin on even-money bets, which made their tables more attractive than rivals' and brought players in. The arithmetic is easy to check: with one zero the house expects to keep 1/37 of each stake, about 2.7%, while with two zeros it expects 2/38, about 5.3%.

The Blanc wheel also gave roulette its most persistent piece of folklore. The numbers 0 to 36 add up to 666, which earned the game the nickname "the devil's wheel" and a story that François Blanc had struck a bargain with the devil to learn its secrets. The sum is real; the bargain belongs with the Pascal tale.

Monte Carlo takes over

Gambling was banned across the new German Empire in the early 1870s, and the centre of single-zero roulette shifted to Monaco, where François Blanc had taken over the casino concession in the 1860s. The district around the casino was named Monte Carlo in honour of Prince Charles III, and its gaming hall became the most famous address in European gambling. Two episodes from its history still circulate:

1. "The man who broke the bank." In 1891 an Englishman named Charles Wells won enough to clear the cash reserve of several tables, which was what "breaking the bank" meant at the time. A popular music-hall song made the phrase famous.
2. The run of black. In August 1913 the ball is reported to have landed on black 26 times in a row at a Monte Carlo table, while players kept piling onto red in the belief that it was overdue. The episode is the classic illustration of the gambler's fallacy, which is sometimes called the Monte Carlo fallacy for exactly this reason.

Two zeros: the American wheel

Roulette crossed the Atlantic through French-speaking New Orleans and spread up the Mississippi with the steamboat trade described in our history of riverboat gambling. American operators kept the double zero, and some early wheels are said to have added a third house pocket marked with an eagle before that idea was dropped. The wheel is usually said to have been moved onto the top of the table to make hidden tampering harder. American tables also introduced coloured "wheel chips", one colour per player, so that crowded bets could be told apart.

Roulette's history at a glance

Questions readers ask

Did Blaise Pascal invent roulette?

There is no evidence that he did. His probability work is genuine and important; the link to the wheel was attached later, most likely because his name lent the game a respectable origin story.

When was roulette invented?

The recognisable game dates from eighteenth-century France, with clear descriptions by the 1790s. Its ingredients are older, and its modern single-zero form dates from 1843.

Is roulette older than blackjack?

Not by the written record. A twenty-one card game is mentioned in Spanish fiction published in 1613, long before roulette appears; our piece on vingt-et-un and the roots of blackjack tells that story. Neither game, old as it is, has outgrown the pull of the hot hand fallacy among the people who play it.

Roulette's past is free to read about; the game itself costs money every time the ball drops. It is for adults only, so check that casino play is lawful where you live, settle on an amount before the first spin and leave the table once it is gone.