Educational Archive · Historical biography. Not affiliated with any commercial enterprise.
— Bibliography
Sources & references.
— Books
Primary texts.
Fey, Marshall.Slot Machines: America's Favorite Gaming Device.
Liberty Belle Books, 1983 (multiple subsequent editions). The most thorough
family biography of Charles Fey, written by his grandson. Contains photographs,
letters, and family records.
Costa, Nicholas.Automatic Pleasures: The History of the Coin Machine.
The Bayview Press, 1988. Treats Fey within a wider history of late-19th-century
coin-operated mechanical devices and trade stimulators.
Geist, Christopher D. Various essays on Gilded Age mechanical
industry, published in Journal of American Culture, 1990s–2000s.
— Museums & archives
Institutional records.
Nevada State Museum — holds an authenticated replica of the
Liberty Bell mechanism, with accompanying interpretive notes on its mechanical
design and historical context.
Smithsonian National Museum of American History — references
the Liberty Bell within its broader collection on late-19th-century mechanical
industry.
San Francisco Public Library, History Center — city directories,
business records, and photographs from the 1885–1944 period.
Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma, California — burial records
and family plot documentation.
— Public records
Civil documentation.
Birth and emigration records (Vöhringen parish registers; passenger manifests
from the SS Etruria, his 1885 transatlantic passage), San Francisco marriage
records (1889), 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 U.S. Federal Census entries,
San Francisco Chronicle obituaries (November 1944), and California State
Archives industrial directories of the 1894–1909 period.
These records are publicly accessible through Ancestry.com, the FamilySearch
archives, the National Archives at San Francisco (Archives I, San Bruno), and
the California State Archives in Sacramento.
📜 A note on accuracy
Wherever possible, this archive cites its sources directly. However, much of
Fey's life — like that of many late-19th-century mechanics — survives only
through family memory, partial records, and trade-journal references that
sometimes contradict one another. We have favored the most consistently
documented version of events, but we acknowledge that biography is always, in
some measure, reconstruction.