Games played with a wheel are believed to be as old as the wheel itself, but the game of roulette didn't appear until the 17th century. Details about the birth of roulette (French for "little wheel") are sketchy, but one theory holds that pioneering mathematician Blaise Pascal invented the mechanism in 1657 while attempting to develop a perpetual motion device.

This first known instance of a ball and rotating wheel being used as a game was in 1720 in England in a game called "roly-poly." Development came to standstill when this game, and all games of chance were outlawed twenty years later. Evolution was slow over the course of the next fifty years, and the first modern form of the game, with red and black colors and a board with 36 numbers plus 0 and 00, finally appeared in French casinos in the 1790's.

Roulette reached the United States by way of immigrating Europeans in the early 1800's. As it found it started to become established in American casinos some owners altered the game by adding an "Eagle" pocket and paying only 26 to 1 on a single number win. These tables become unpopular for the huge edge it gave the house, and they were soon done away with.

The brothers Francios and Louis Blanc are credited with the creation of the very first roulette table to have a single zero. They suspected that the lowered house edge (about 2.5%) would be popular with gambling house patrons, but they weren't able to establish it in their homeland because of French gambling laws. They decided to move to Bavaria, where the table enjoyed great success until gambling was outlawed there as well. Shortly after this setback, Louis Blanc received an invitation from Charles III, the Prince of Monaco, to establish a casino in Monte Carlo for the cost of 2 Million Francs. He accepted, and his lavish casino helped turn Monte Carlo into the high rollers paradise that it eventually became.

In 1873 a British man named Joseph Jaggers "broke the bank" at a Monte Carlo casino playing the roulette table. Because of manufacturing irregularities, roulette wheels were not perfectly balanced in the 19th century. Jaggers, who was an engineer by trade, suspected this, and employed clerks to record the outcomes of several tables. Just as he thought, a few tables suffered from biases, and he exploited the advantage, winning hundreds of thousands of francs before the casino eventually intervened.