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 filed 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