A lottery, in its simplest form, is a drawing of lots in which the winners receive prizes out of the money collected from tickets. Throughout history it has often been used by authorities as a means of raising funds. The rules and probabilities of today's lotteries are on the Lotteries and keno page.
The towns of the Low Countries, 15th century
According to an overview published by EBSCO, lotteries and raffles are known in Europe from the 15th century onwards and were often used to collect funds for construction projects. The first lotteries with money prizes appear in the towns of the Low Countries, and the sources disagree on the date of the very first one. A popular history overview from the Netherlands places the first recorded public lottery in 1434, at Sluis, and states that the first lotteries with prize money raised funds for the poor and for fortifications. The Wikipedia encyclopedia cites a record dated 9 May 1445 at L'Ecluse (Sluis) about a lottery held for the town's walls and fortifications, and notes that the records of Ghent, Utrecht and Bruges suggest even older lotteries.
The historian Jeroen Puttevils, of the University of Antwerp, studies these lotteries as an economic and social phenomenon. For the organisers they were "a source of emergency income"; for ticket buyers, a way to recover interest payments and arrears owed to them by towns, a form of excitement and entertainment, and a way to show charity. One detail preserved in the archives is the "lottery rhymes": short verses submitted by buyers of both sexes and from many different social groups, and read out on stage during the draws. A study published in 2024 in BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review analysed more than 11,000 such texts from five lotteries held between 1446 and 1606.
France and England, 16th century
According to the same EBSCO overview, official state lotteries were set up by King Francis I of France in 1539 and by Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1567.
The English lottery is well documented. The historian Gary Hicks shows that the royal proclamation of 23 August 1567 announced "a very rich lotterie generall without any blanckes", with nearly 30,000 prizes promised. The money was intended for the repair of the havens, the strength of the realm and other public works. Tickets, at ten shillings each, were sold in London and in other towns of England and Ireland. The draw began on 11 January 1569, near the west door of St Paul's Cathedral, and lasted until 6 May 1569. The result was poor: fewer than 34,000 tickets were sold instead of the 400,000 planned, because the public, Hicks writes, was convinced it was being cheated.
Also in England, according to EBSCO, a lottery established by King James I helped finance the Jamestown colony in Virginia.
Genoa and the birth of lotto
The game called lotto, with numbers from 1 to 90, has a different origin. The Italian encyclopedia Treccani (Albino Uggè, 1934) explains that it grew out of the bets placed in Genoa on the twice-yearly selection of five members of the Serenissimi Collegi. Their names were drawn by lot from those of 120 candidates, placed in an urn called the seminario; hence the name "game of the seminario". The same source notes that some attribute the invention to a Genoese patrician, Benedetto Gentile, but that there is no proof of this. The number of names was later reduced to 90.
In the 17th and 18th centuries lotto on the Genoese model spread through the Italian states; in some of them the names of candidates for public office were replaced by those of poor girls of marriageable age. Outside Italy it was adopted, with variations, in Austria (1752), Belgium (1760), Prussia (1763), Denmark (1771) and France (1776). In unified Italy it remained part of the revenue foreseen in the state budget from 1863, and the draw of five numbers out of 90 still takes place today.
Bans and revival
Not every state kept its lotteries. According to the same Italian encyclopedia, the public lottery was abolished, at least as a permanent institution, in England (1826), Belgium (1830), France (1836), Sweden (1841) and Switzerland (1865).
In the United States, according to EBSCO, most states had banned lotteries by the late 19th century, and the federal government restricted the mailing of lottery materials and advertisements (1890) and interstate commerce in them (1895). The revival came in 1964, when the state of New Hampshire set up a state sweepstakes tied to horse racing, in order to avoid the federal bans.
What has not changed
Rules, prices and declared purposes have changed from one period to another; the probabilities are still set by combinatorics. In a 6/49 lottery, the chance of matching all six numbers is 1 in 13,983,816. Each draw is independent of the previous ones, and "overdue" numbers are no more likely to come up; the explanation is in Gambler's fallacy.
Sources
- EBSCO Research Starters, "Lotteries", 2023.
- IsGeschiedenis, "De loterij door de eeuwen heen".
- Wikipedia (English), article "Lottery".
- University of Antwerp, research page of Jeroen Puttevils.
- Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga, Sara Budts and Jeroen Puttevils, "(Fe)male Voices on Stage: Finding Patterns in Lottery Rhymes of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries with and without AI", BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 2024.
- Financial History Network, announcement of Jeroen Puttevils' online seminar of 16 November 2020.
- Gary Hicks, "It Could Be Ye: England's first lottery", The History Press.
- Albino Uggè, "Lotto", Enciclopedia Italiana, Treccani, 1934.
- Treccani, "Lotto, gioco del", Dizionario di Economia e Finanza.