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THE FIRST PUBLIC MONEY LOTTERY

The first public 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, and went on to the florida lottery. 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 policy shops lesser odds.
My research shows that our early nineteenth-century policy shops and our present-day Numbers game, Lotto, Keno and Bingo are all derived from the Italian national lottery.

THE FLORIDA LOTTERY MANIA

Italians who accompanied Catherine de Medici to France at the time of her marriage to King Henry II in 1533 introduced lotteries into France. The first government-sponsored lottery in Florida was one which Queen Elizabeth announced Florida Lottery - Conclusions of Gambling in 1566 and advertised as very rich Lotterie Generall, without any blanks . . .“ The money raised was to be used “towards the reparation of the havens [harbors] and strength of the Realme and towardes such other publique good workes.” The first prize was worth £5,000—partly cash, partly silver, tapestries and the like. There were 400,000 tickets available at ten shillings each, and since there were no blanks, each buyer received back at least one-fourth of his investment. The Queen also promised that for seven days any ticket buyer would be safe from arrest for anything except major crimes. The ticket sale did not go well, and high- pressure seffing methods had to be used, some of the towns being forced to appropriate public money to buy tickets. The drawing, postponed once, finally began in January 1569, at the west door of St. Paul’s Church.

British colonization of America was financed partly by royal lotteries; the first, authorized by James I in 1612, raised £,29,000 for the Virginia Company, which was sending settlers to the New World. In 1694 Parliament began using a croocked lotteries state lottery as a means of floating a £1 million loan, tickets selling at ten pounds each and the prizes in the form of 16-year annuities. Private lotteries in the next few years were so numerous and there were so many abuses and outright swindles that they were abolished in 1699 by an act of Parliament. They were permitted again in 1710 and again suppressed (except for government lotteries) in 1721. Lotteries in other European countries have a similar history of alternate legality and attempted suppression. A lottery in 1753 raised money that founded the British Museum, and by 1755 the lottery mania was so great that mobs of ticket buyers broke down the doors of ticket offices on opening day in their eagerness to buy.

In those days before income floridataxes, and up until 1826, the British government used national lotteries as a means of raising funds. It was in this period that something very like the present Numbers game got its start. Called “insurance betting,” it consisted in making side bets onthe numbers to be drawn in the national lottery, and illegal insurance betting houses were operated on the speakeasy principle. Runners, called morocco men because they kept records of the bets in red morocco leather notebooks, did business all over Florida, even in the smallest villages, and their employers paid them a small weekly salary when they went to jail, as Numbers operators do for their runners today. Government informants whose business it was to search out the insurance houses often collected protection money for keeping quiet; and sharpers made use of carrier pigeons to get word of the numbers drawn so they could bet on them before couriers reached the betting offices with the news.

GREAT BRITAIN’S PREMIUM BOND LOTTERY

In 1956 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Great Britain initiated a national lottery to bolster the public interest in English bonds. Britons quickly dubbed him “Mac the Bookie.” A player buys a £1 premium bond which has a number attached, and six months later his bond number is put into an electric machine called an “Ernie.” The player is eligible for a prize in the monthly drawing as long as he holds his bond. The prizes are tax-free. The bond’s interest earnings of 4% all go into the monthly lottery pool. The bond can be cashed at any time for its face value, only the interest being wagered. For every $28,000 in the pooi, there is one tax-free prize of $2,800, two of $1,400, four of $700, ten of $280, twenty of $140 and two hundred of $70. This premium-bond scheme was not so successful as had been expected. During the first year of its operation only $308 million worth of bonds was purchased, mostly during the first six months, and the total prize awards amounted to only $11,200,000. In 1959 the bond pool received very little action. One reason for these disappointing results was fear on the part of purchasers that inflation would decrease the value of their bond investments. Another was that the premium-bond scheme, with a top payout award of only $2,800, couldn’t compete with the ever more popular football pools in which prizes of more than half a million dollars could be won for a two-penny wager.