Florida Lottery History

CROOKED LOTTERIES

Before 1895, in states where lotteries were legal there were usually regulations demanding that lottery operators be of unquestionable character and reputation before being issued a license. There were then no such restrictions on the many illegal operators, who often set up business with scarcely enough money to print their first batch of tickets. Hundreds of lotteries of various sorts sprang up overnight operated by crooks, confidence men and cheats who did a booming business... Croocked Lotteries

EARLY AMERICAN LOTTERIES

The lottery craze that swept England in Georgian times had counterpart in the American colonies. As early as 1665 the Dutch held a lottery for the poor in New Amsterdam. There were a half dozen lotteries operating in each of the 13 colonies most of the time preceding the American Revolution, and it was all very respectable. Benjamin Franklin and other prominent citizens sponsored a lottery to raise funds to buy a battery of cannon for the defense of Philadelphia. In 1762 John Hancock helped managed a lottery to raise money to rebuilt Boston’s Faneuil Hall after it had been damaged by fire; in 1768 George Washington managed a lottery for the purpose of building road over the Cumberland Mountains. These, like the early English lotteries, were a form of voluntary taxation... American Lotteries

THE FIRST PUBLIC MONEY LOTTERY

The first public florida lottery paying money prizes was La Lotto de Firenze, which began in Florence, Italy, in 1530, and was soon followed I by similar drawings in Genoa and Venice to raise funds for various public projects. This custom spread throughout Italy, and when the Italian republics were consolidated in 1870 the Italian national lottery into being. Except for a few interruptions due to wars, this has been in constant operation ever since. Today, five numbers between 1 and 90 are drawn every Saturday from each of ten wheels identified by the names of Ten Italian Cities. Players may wager as little on their selection of some or all five of the numbers to bedrawn from a specified wheel. A player who correctly guesses all five numbers drawn from a named wheel is paid off at odds of 1,000,000 to 1. His chance of doing it is 1 in 43,949,268. Other winning selections are paid off at lesser odds... The First Lottery

State Lotteries and How They Work

When the state of New Hampshire voted to go into the gambling business with statewide lottery in 1963, it broke a 70-year precedent and became the first state lottery in the United States. (Puerto Rico has had a national lottery since 1934.) The moralists wailed that the plan would fail and go down in history as New Hampshire’s fool tax experiment... State Lotteries

POLICY FLORIDA SHOPS

Most of the clandestine lotteries during the 1800s used as their “winning number the same ones which were drawn in one of the more popular legal lotteries. This made it unnecessary to hold illegal public drawings, which would be raided by the police. Like the clandestine operators of the Italian national lottery, many illegal operators also allowed players to select their own numbers, and wager as little as a penny that the one, two, three, four or five numbers selected would be among the first five or ten numbers drawn. These illegal operations were known as policy shops. Most of them went out when the last of the legal lotteries were abolished in 1895, although a few continued in the early 1900s by claiming to employ the winning numbers drawn by foreign lotteries. There was little public enthusiasm for these, and they did not last long... Policy Shops