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Although there are legends about old time blackjack players getting an edge by "casing" the single deck, the modern history of blackjack advantage system starts in 1958 with the publication of the basic strategy for playing the hands by Cantey, McDermott, Maisel and Baldwin. Initially published in the American Journal of the American Statistical Association, it caused much excitement among both gamblers and statisticians. I remember someone showing me a dog-eared copy of the article, which I immediately copied and committed to memory.
Then the four originators published their basic strategy, all their work done on hand calculators, in a book called, I believe, Winning Blackjack, which has now become an extremely hard-to-find collectors item. I wish I had saved my copy. The original basic blackjack strategy published in this book is very close to that which is in use today.
I was working in the Aerospace industry in 1958 when Winning Blackjack was published. The book became the reason for frequent trips to Las Vegas. Myself and two or three friends would meet at a rendezvous point in the San Fernando Valley, get on the Hollywood Freeway, connect to the San Bernardino Freeway, stop in Barstow for coffee, making the 296-mile drive in about six hours. Our first stop was the Dunes where we would look for Ralph, our favorite dealer, and play single-deck blackjack dealt to the bottom well into the night (remember this was before Thorp's book). Our $100 bankroll was converted $20 at a time into real silver dollars, which were the dollar chips of choice in those days, and we would grind away with our $1-unit bets well into the night.
Playing almost even against the house as we were, we never lost much and actually ended many trips money ahead. Our betting strategy was to increase our bet $1 on successive wins and hope for a winning streak.
Getting back to the publication of the basic blackjack strategy, it was the dawn of the developmental work, which continues right up until this day. It started by sparking an interest in Ed Thorp with his realization that blackjack is different from roulette and craps because, unlike craps and roulette, the outcome of each hand depends on prior events, i.e. which cards had been dealt and which cards remain in the deck to be played. Statisticians use the words "independent trials" and "dependent trials" to describe this phenomenon.