William Silas Redd was an innovative man at a young age and by the late 1930's he began building a business with 1000 penny pinball machines. Since the opportunities to grow his business were limited in the South, he sold his machines and moved to Sterling, Illinois. By the mid 1940's he was in the jukebox business.

People everywhere loved jukeboxes and they were everywhere, restaurants, bars, and dance clubs. Redd moved to Boston to operate a six state distributorship. By 1967 he had become a major stockholder in Bally Distributing Company, a company that placed slot machines in casinos. He moved to Nevada.

He would form the company which grew into International Game Technology which manufactures 75 percent of the slot machines in the United States. He moved on to form International Technical Systems in the 1980's. As an innovator in the industry, he introduced video poker machines in Nevada and later the bar video poker games. Redd became known as the slot machine king. Redd passed away in 2003.