Throughline - Get Rich Quick: The American Lottery

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Want to get rich quick? You're not alone. Right now, Americans spend over $100 billion, yes billion, every year on lottery tickets. Today on the show, in collaboration with Scratch and Win from WGBH, how the mafia, Sputnik, medical equipment, and the electoral college led to American's obsession with playing the numbers.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from This Is History. Discover the incredible true story of Mansa Musa, who many claim was the wealthiest ruler in history. Immerse yourself in the epic six-part series, Empire of Gold. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Today, there are numerous ways to gamble. And if cards aren't your thing, there's slots or roulette for you. Or if you're hours away from a casino, no problem.

You can just hop on your phone. Tap into BetMGM Casino and you're entering a huge library full of exclusive games. But maybe you're not really into gambling games. Well, then you have sports betting. New customers bet $5 to get 150 in bonus bets if you win. FanDuel, America's number one sports book. Whether you're at a poker table or at home watching a basketball game,

legal gambling has never been easier. But gambling's got a complicated history in the U.S. We allow some forms of it ban others. We allow it in some places, but not everywhere. It's like we can't seem to make up our minds. So how did gambling go from an illicit vice to a ubiquitous industry? What set that in motion? Meet Ian Kass, a producer from GBH in Boston,

a guy who recently got obsessed with one of the biggest forms of legalized gambling, state lotteries. I think they help explain so much about the world we live in now. Like, if you went to sleep in 1960 and you woke up today, like, your mind would be blown. Mind blown? Sign us up. I think the central argument you're making here is that lotteries were a mechanism to which gambling came out of the shadows

and into the mainstream. And I've always wondered since I was a kid, like, isn't it just legal gambling? Cause you know, I see, I saw people, adults all getting their little like scratch and win and I never understood that, but it seems like you're getting at the core of that in the series.

Yeah, I mean, in the 1970s, you used to have a mafia run lottery games. And they were very similar. They had you'd pick your numbers, you'd pay your 25 cents or your dollar. And the state truly just moved in and replicated the games that the mafia was operating right down to the odds, the number of digits, the payout rate, everything about it.

It was just a carbon copy and it was no secret. So basically the legal gambling regime that we have that grew out of the state lotteries is just a total ripoff of the mafia run gambling. And then, of course, it starts to innovate and experiment on top of that. So, like, how did you first encounter the story? What was the thing that got you, like, hooked on it? So the beginning of this story for me was I was producing another series that we did at GBH called The Big Dig that was all about infrastructure.

And so I was interviewing a lot of state officials. And one of the questions I will sometimes ask people is like, hey, any other interesting stories that I should be interested in? So I was interviewing this guy, and he was like, well, if you want a good state politics story, you should look at gambling. And when he said that, I think, and maybe this is somewhat naive, but there was, even though I grew up with the lottery and everything, I don't think I'd really thought of gambling as a political story or as like a government story.

It hadn't really clicked in a adult mind conscious way that the lottery is an official agency of state government whose official task it is to like sell gambling products to the public. And so that was the starting point for me. At that point, I just did some very cursory research of like, oh, which states have lotteries and how much money do they actually make? And I very quickly encountered this statistic that if you kind of stack up all the lottery states, there is one clear outlier way out ahead of the pack where people spend way more money on lottery tickets than any other state.

And it is the state where I live. And I never knew that. Today, obviously, sports gambling is everywhere. It's to the point where it's unavoidable. I'm watching the game with my nine year old son and every commercial at least every break has at least one Draft Kings and you have the most famous people in the world trusted voices selling you and your child gambling. Why do you think lotteries were a turning point? What was it about lotteries in the history of gambling

that kind of got us from people running numbers illegally to sports gambling between there and there? Why was the lottery such a turning point in that history? So I interviewed a long time Massachusetts congressman named Barney Frank, who listeners may know, he's famous for a lot of things, financial reform, all kinds of stuff. Barney Frank has always been a big proponent

of legal gambling. And the way he described it to me, the legacy of lotteries, is that when the lottery started, there was so much cultural opposition to legal gambling. And there was these kind of like doomsday scenarios of if you make this legal, you're going to see foreclosures, you're going to see bankruptcy,

you're going to see broken homes. Like truly, society will come unraveled if people can freely bet their money anytime out in broad daylight. You'll have mafia gangsters like infiltrating state government, taking over the games, rigging the drawings. That was the level of fear around the idea of state-run gambling. And what Barney Frank told me is that the lotteries came out and I don't want to say that there are no negative social effects or no costs to legalized gambling, but it wasn't the doomsday scenario. Like the sky didn't fall.

And also at the same time, sort of wet the state's appetite. Maybe we could, you know, put a casino down by the waterfront. Or maybe we turn on the sports betting thing and we take a cut of that. So it sets all those other things in motion. This opens the can of worms. For sure. Yeah. And we're living in that, like, you know, the can of worms. We're living in the can of worms. It's really, it's wild and it's totally inescapable at this point.

I'm Ramjeet. I'm Rand and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. What you're about to hear is an epic story that has it all. From Sputnik to mob members like Fat Vinnie the stool pigeon to using medical equipment to expose the flaws in a lottery game. It's all tied up in this idea of getting rich quick. And the thing that connects all those dots

is something I've never really thought about, but sits behind almost every convenience store counter today. Coming up, the scratch ticket. Hi, my name is Kevin Weber from Kansas City, Kansas. You are listening to ThruLine by NPR as I put stripes down after paving the road here on Ridgeview and 119th and Olathe. Good job, things well, but man, vehicle infrastructure. Enjoy. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Sending or spending money abroad?

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This message comes from Snap Judgment. Each episode is a movie of the mind. Storytelling with a beat. Raw. Intimate. Real. Strap in. Subscribe to Snap Judgment wherever you get your podcasts. Part 1. America's Favorite Pastime. Today, there are only five states in the U.S. that don't have a state lottery.

Everyone else is all in on it. But before state lotteries became the big behemoth that they are today, there was one little game that started it all. Here's producer Ian Koss with the story. So the U.S. Census Bureau collects lottery sales figures for every state. And the key number to look at, really the metric of any lottery's success, is sales per capita, usually per adult. When I first came across these figures, I could see right away that there's a spread. There's some stragglers on the low end, like Wyoming, North Dakota,

where the average adult only spends around $50 a year on the lottery. Then there are a lot of states in the middle, California, Texas, Illinois, all in about the $300 range, which feels like about what I would have guessed, if you asked me to. But when you get to the top of the list, things get weird. New York, Michigan, Georgia, they're all respectable at around $500 or $600 per adult. And then there is the loan outlier, way off the charts, at $1,037. That's $1,037 of lottery tickets per adult sold every year in the state of Massachusetts. When I first saw that number, I had a hard time believing

it. I had to check it in a few different places, make sure I was understanding what exactly was being measured. It just seemed high and also unexpected. The world we live in now was made possible by state lotteries. It was the lotteries that did the slow cultural work of normalizing gambling decade by decade and de-stigmatizing it to some extent. They made all this possible. But obviously that cultural work remains somehow incomplete.

We can't fully accept what we so clearly want. And no gambling enterprise captures that strange tension quite like the one that brings in $1,037 every year for every adult in the state of Massachusetts. Today you can pretty much buy a lottery ticket anywhere. Gas station, liquor store, supermarket, there's even whole vending machines dedicated to it. But not that long ago, legally paying a few bucks for the possibility of winning hundreds or thousands in return was a foreign idea.

The first modern lottery in America started in New Hampshire in 1964. Do you want me to go back to New Hampshire and how preposterous the game was? Sure. Jonathan Cohen is the author of For a Dollar and a Dream, state lotteries in modern America. Yeah. I mean, so the New Hampshire lottery that started in 1964 was rooted in horse racing, but it was unrecognizable to a modern lottery game. At that time, really the only place outside of Vegas that you could legally gamble was

at the racetrack. And there were all kinds of laws limiting or prohibiting other kinds of gambling. So to get around that, New Hampshire, being the first out of the gate, attempted to create a lottery based on horse racing. The result was a strange hybrid multi-step game. And you had to put your name in a little slot and then you pull a lever down on a box and it cuts your ticket in half.

And then they draw a ticket, but the ticket isn't actually who wins the lottery. It's like to associate a ticket with a horse. And then you have like a separate drawing for what horse race we're gonna do. And then it's like, oh, Ian Cos, like you have horse number seven and number seven won that race. So now like you win the lottery. Congratulations.

Tickets went on sale in March. The drawing to select the final contestants and their horses was in July and the horse race itself was in September. So six months from purchase to pay off. All this to say the games were slow. They were expensive. The prizes were small and they were hard to payoff. All this to say the games were slow, they were expensive, the prizes were small, and they were hard to understand. The New Hampshire lottery was not a great success. So the next two lottery states, New York and New Jersey, started to innovate, bringing the game closer to something we would recognize with regular drawings and no horses involved. Which sort of starts this trend of just like more faster with bigger prizes.

But still, a weekly drawing is not the same thing as instant gratification. And it would take a few more years to get there. It's hard for me to imagine a world without scratch tickets. Americans spend more on scratch tickets than we do on pizza, more than we do on all Coca-Cola products. Yet the scratch ticket as a consumer item has only existed for 50 years. Not so long ago, the very idea of an instant lottery was odd, scary even.

We're talking about huge sums of money at stake, all bound up in flimsy pieces of paper, sitting on the shelf of a convenience store. What if the tickets could be copied or rigged? What if they could be hacked? The leap to instant was perilous and almost didn't happen at all. In fact, the creation of the first scratch-off lottery ticket unfolds something like a Rube Goldberg machine, a long chain of metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian

rocket. We'll begin that chain in October of 1957 with a 10th grade student in a suburb of Detroit named John Coza. Do you remember when Sputnik launched? Did you hear it on the news? Oh, absolutely. Everybody was listening to it. You are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the Earth-circling satellite, one of the

great scientific feats of the age. You could hear those little beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. The beeps, yeah. And so was that part of the inspiration for you? Was it almost like a patriotic duty to study science and computers and be at the frontier of knowledge? Well, this was in the middle of the Cold War and everybody from the government to universities to business got interested in promoting sciences.

Coase's high school started bringing in guests to lecture on different technical fields, and one of those lectures was about the very young field of computer science. Now in 1957, a cutting-edge computer weighed upwards of 750 pounds. It was not something you would have at home, but Coza was interested, so he decided to build his own. Using surplus parts from jukeboxes and pinball machines. It was a very simple computer that did a single task. It was a computer that calculated the day of the week for the date,

which of course is a fairly simple calculation, but at the time, this was all wired up with relays and rotary switches and so forth. So you could go, you know, July 4th, 1776. What's the day of the week? Well, I don't know, but you could answer that question. Ten years later, John Koza was, according to him, one of the first people in the world to hold an undergraduate degree in computer science, and also one of the first to pursue a PhD in the subject. I think I might have been the 12th or 13th in the country.

And at this point, a second and largely unrelated interest begins to alter his course in life, politics. When I was a graduate student at University of Michigan in the 60s, I had published a board game involving the Electoral College. Cosa was deeply fascinated by how we select our president, and at the time a lot of other people were too. His board game about the Electoral College hit the shelves just before the 1968 election, which remember was a truly chaotic election cycle.

Lyndon Johnson dropped out, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, George Wallace was running as a serious third party candidate. So it was quite an unusual election. Yeah. And there was a lot of attention on the electoral college. On the all important electoral college board. And those all important electoral votes that gives... With all that news coverage, Coza thought that a game about the arcane functioning of

U.S. elections might just break through. It was a flop. In any case, an executive of this game company in Chicago, this was a company that made supermarket and gas station giveaway games. Read an article about this game that I had produced and he thought it might be relevant to his company's business. The executive invited COSA to Chicago to meet and COSA agreed. They were looking for somebody who knew something about probability and combinatorics and finite mathematics, which as it happened was something I was very much involved in as a student.

Now mind you, that had nothing to do with the game involving the Electoral College, but it was just a fortuitous case. They reached out and they found exactly the right person. You can think of John Coza as a serial problem solver. In fact, the first line of his Wikipedia page is not even about scratch tickets. It's about the use of genetic programming for the optimization of complex problems, whatever that is. There's also a paragraph in there about how he has spent decades,

decades leading a campaign to ditch the electoral college and instead elect presidents by popular vote. He's still working on that problem. But the point is, when Coza sees something that's not working smoothly, he gets in there, whatever the problem is. That's a powerful kind of mind. And this game company had a problem for Cosa. Supermarket games were popular in the 1960s.

Stores would give them out for free as a little treat for customers. And the prizes were fairly small, sometimes less than one penny. But these games did already use a kind of rub-off film. They were, in effect, proto-scratch tickets. And we got to talking and it turned out that they were trying to produce a kind of game where every ticket could be a winner. The way this particular game worked is there were 10 scratch-off spots on the ticket, each of which revealed a playing card.

Ace, King, Queen, Jack. Players were allowed to scratch off only three spots, and if they got a three of a kind, then they won a small prize. The game company already had the basic technology for printing these tickets, where they needed help, was figuring out what to print on them. So while still chipping away at his PhD, Coza worked with his game company to develop a system for generating and printing up to 500,000 different ticket combinations, each of which

had the potential to win, had a three of a kind. In the 1960s, that took some doing. But with the stakes fairly low, the security around these games was also fairly low. Probably in about half the games we ran, there would be a sort of a little run of tickets in a little town, and you'd realize that somebody in that town figured out some weakness in the game that we had missed. For example, a player might figure out a way to actually see what was printed underneath that scratch off film and know where the matching playing cards were. And of course we would fix it for the next game.

So we never had a big problem, but it was a knife edge process. I don't know if you're thinking about this at the time, but it was giving you a chance to like beta test and experiment with this idea of scratch off tickets. And you sort of like worked out all the bugs. Right, so the biggest single game we ran was the one for Shell Oil in the United States with 150 million tickets.

And we had no problems at all with that game. We had perfected a system that could produce States with 150 million tickets. And we had no problems at all with that game. We had perfected a system that could produce a very, very secure ticket. Unpredictable and unhackable. A perfect game of chance. And just when it seemed like they had it all figured out, this game company he was working for, J&H, went bankrupt. In December of 1972, COSA was cut loose. Which coincidentally was exactly the month when I graduated and got my PhD.

So now you're a newly minted PhD, unemployed, with years of experience in the nascent instant ticket business, what do you do with all that? Well, again, a lucky coincidence, in the last year of J&H's existence, we actually made some sales calls on state lotteries trying to see if they would like to run a game like this. The idea was to take this ticket design that COSA had perfected in the form of a fun promotional gimmick and bring it into the big leagues of actual gambling. Instead of fractions of pennies, the ticket would offer up thousands of dollars. That is, if they could find a state willing to try it. In 1972, there were just seven states operating lotteries, and it turns out none of them

were interested in a scratch ticket. It's hard to imagine passing on that pitch now, but you have to understand that these early lotteries were fragile and extremely conservative agencies. Gambling at the time was largely associated with the underworld, the mob. Mike, you don't come to Las Vegas and talk to a man like Mo Green like that. In 1972, just as Cosa was first pitching his idea for a scratch ticket, The Godfather was the number one movie in America. It showed the extortion and murder lurking beneath the glitz of Vegas, the almost magnetic

attraction between gambling and crime. with anyone against the family again. This was a shadowy business the state was wading into. In any whiff of irregularity, a fixed drawing, a forged ticket would shatter the public's trust. Again, Jonathan Cohen. They were so concerned about organized crime and this imprimatur of legitimacy that they didn't get people who designed games for a living to run the lotteries. They got like FBI agents. In fact, the directors of the first three state lotteries were all former FBI men.

To assure the public that the games were fair, even if they were designed poorly. That was the focus. Security, integrity, not innovation, and certainly not combinatorial mathematics. But in the 1970s, the focus would start to change. Because just as the specter of organized crime forced those early lotteries to be cautious, it soon would force them to be aggressive and competitive. One state in particular would lead that charge, and John Coza, unemployed and looking for an opening, would join them. Coming up, how a small, super-liberal, college-filled, and once puritanical state somehow created the gold standard of American

lotteries. Hi, this is Nicole calling from Boston, Nass. You're listening to Thru Line. I love listening to the show. There's always something that I learn, even on topics that I think I already know a lot about. Hey, everyone. We do a lot of research and reading here at ThruLine. So for our latest bonus episode, just for our ThruLine Plus supporters, our team is sharing the historical books they've loved

recently in our ThruLine Plus Book Club. Listen now and get sponsor-free listening for all of our episodes by signing up for ThruLine Plus at plus.npr.org slash ThruLine. Part 2. The World's First Scratch Ticket After New Hampshire became the first state to start selling lottery tickets, other states like Massachusetts slowly started to follow. But these early versions of the lottery didn't really have the same thrill as today's lotteries. Here's Ian Kass with more.

The Massachusetts Lottery launched in 1972, offering only a single product, a weekly drawing so generic it was called simply The Game. By 1973, excitement around The Game had already worn off. Sales were in decline. But it's not because there weren't people who wanted to gamble. That same year, 1973, WGBH ran an hour-long special on the issue of gambling. Good evening, I'm Alan Raymond and this is Stateline. Tonight we'll be discussing proposals to legalize gambling in Massachusetts.

The host interviewed a whole range of experts and public officials with a whole range of opinions, but they could all agree on one thing. Illegal gambling is a way of life in Boston and across the Commonwealth. Illegal gambling run by organized crime was everywhere. Two billion dollars a year is being gambled illegally. We've averaged about 500 arrests a year. It was a big problem. Illegal gambling is wrong.

Illegal gamblers have ways of making people pay. And no amount of law enforcement could solve it. Perhaps the most you can hope to do with such a public desire to indulge is to try to keep it at some kind of tolerable level. The discussion of gambling policy in the 70s really reminds me of the discussion around drug policy in more recent years. We were losing the war on gambling, just like we lost the war on drugs. The demand was just too strong.

And this looming presence of illegal gambling exerted two opposing forces on the state lotteries. I've mentioned how it required caution to avoid any appearance of corruption, FBI agents as lottery directors. But on the other hand, it required urgency, action. Because one of the reasons to have a state lottery in the first place was to put those illegal operations out of business. And in 1973, the state's brand new lottery with its single weekly drawing wasn't going to cut it. If legalization is to have any effect on organized crime, better services have to be provided

by the legal operation. That last voice in the radio special was Ted Harrington, who served for several years as the head of the region's organized crime strike force. Most people like to gamble and yet it was declared illegal. That's Harrington speaking today. As Al Capone said, I'm performing a public service. I'm giving the public what they want and I'm giving the public what they want. And at the initiation of the lottery, the underworld was still providing better services.

In the early 70s, Harrington had helped to develop a key mafia informant named Vincent Teresa, known to his critics as Fat Vinnie the stool pigeon. The two would meet in guarded motel rooms around the state to discuss new intelligence or prepare for testimony. Testimony that would influence the national conversation around organized crime. Vincent Charles Theresa has 28 years experience in the criminal world. Theresa made national news in 1971 when he testified before a Senate committee, and the coverage focused on his main message. I'm talking about a definite syndicate operation that strictly starts with gambling.

It all starts with gambling. All starts with gambling. Without gambling, they got nothing. Did his testimony inform your thinking? Well, of course, it shaped everybody's conception of organized crime. Teresa once described gambling as, quote, a chain-link fence that stretches to every place in the world, the standby and the foundation. From it comes the corrupt politician and policeman,

the bribes and payoffs, and sometimes murder. If you could crush gambling, you would put the mob out of business. They must have daily action, legal betting on all forms of gambling, namely... This is why Harrington and others were pressuring the state to be much more aggressive in the legal gambling services they offered. We're proposing to compete with them in an area which we feel we can compete with them. At that time, numbers rackets and sports bookies

could offer their customers daily action, tax-free winnings, better odds, better payouts, anonymity, and the ability to bet on credit. Simply wouldn't be as effective as theirs, I suppose. So why on earth would you play the boring state lottery? I'm sorry, we have run out of time. I'd like to thank you all for being here tonight and thanks to all of you who called.

This is the Eastern Public Radio Network. In 1973, it was time for the lottery to up its game, to provide what Al Capone would call a public service, but wrapped up in a new and legal packaging. And John Cosa, the unemployed computer scientist, had the perfect idea for them. The instant ticket. To Cosa, the potential of this game design seemed obvious. You could print millions of lottery tickets, ship them to every corner of the state, and packaged within each one would be suspense,

entertainment, and the promise of instant riches. So after he was laid off, he and another jobless colleague, Dan Bauer, decided to start their own company, Scientific Games. It was just the two of them, operated out of an apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan and a kitchen table in Chicago. They started going back to those same lotteries they had pitched before, but this time, there was one that was ready to hear them out. Massachusetts. Even better, the director of the Massachusetts lottery was no FBI agent. The director there was a PhD in mathematics, so he happened to really understand the scientific basis for what we were doing.

Everyone called the lottery director doctor. Dr. Peralt. And in addition to being a mathematician, Dr. Peralt also happened to be an expert bridge player who once took his eight children on a family vacation to Las Vegas, in part to study the wheels and cards as illustrations of statistics. So when John Koza, PhD in computer science, arrived in Massachusetts, things seemed promising. The man in charge spoke his language, combinatorics and all, and the people around him were eager to try something new. The Massachusetts lottery was very innovative. That is, they were prepared to try an instant

game. There was just one problem. They had already given a contract for the instant game to another company. Another company had beaten them to the same idea. It was not a scratch ticket exactly that this other company was offering. It was much more low tech, like an advent calendar

with little paper flaps. But still, it claimed to offer the same basic novelty of an instant reveal. The brand new tickets, it turned out, were already on their way. And COSA could see immediately that those tickets were deeply flawed. And had they run it, it would have been a disaster and there would never have been an instant lottery in any state for decades. It would have been a totally discredited idea at that point. The genius of an instant ticket was that it offered something no illegal operation could,

and it did that by playing to the state's advantage, technology. The only way a ticket like this could work was if it was so sophisticated, no one could copy it, no one could alter it, and no one could hack it. The Massachusetts Lottery had already rejected nearly 20 prototypes by the time they settled on a final design, the one with the paper flaps. Only to have John Koza, this recently graduated whiz kid with a dimpled chin and a comb over,

show up and tell them it was flawed. So on the spot, they made a deal. Koza could take home 50 tickets and do his best to prove they could be hacked. They gave us the tickets. I went back to Ann Arbor, Dan went back to Chicago, and they gave us a week or so. Armed with his obsessive personality, plus years of experience playing cat and mouse with would-be scam artists on his supermarket games, Coza got to work. The competitor's ticket was made of pretty thin paper with flap doors over the hidden numbers held down by glue.

Coza's goal was to reveal those numbers without visibly altering the ticket. And within 24 hours, he had done it. Not just once, not twice, but three separate ways. As I said, they were extremely flimsy tickets. So the two salesmen got back on a plane and flew back to Boston. This time, Dr. Peralt was waiting on the runway

to greet them and carry their bags. Everyone reconvened at lottery headquarters. Probably half a dozen men in dark suits gathered around a conference table eagerly awaiting the presentation. Remember they had not only given a contract to this company to print the tickets, tickets were already printed and in the warehouse ready to be issued and there were 25 million of them. Patiently, COSA walked the lottery staff through each potential vulnerability. One of them involved a cistoscope, which is a medical device. A cistoscope has a tiny lens on the end of a thin, flexible tube.

A doctor might use it to examine the inside of a patient's bladder. Coza used it to peer underneath the ticket's flap doors. That was one way in. And these tickets were printed on just really ordinary paper with line printers. Line printers like a typewriter. It would make a physical bang impression and indent the paper. So method number two was that if you ran the tickets through a photocopier, that raised impression

was just prominent enough that the hidden numbers would come out in the copy. The danger in all this is that any convenience store clerk with a stack of tickets would be able to figure out which ones are the winners and decide who gets them. Again, lotteries were terrified of losing credibility, and this would have done just that. Now the average convenience store clerk might struggle with the first two methods Coza demonstrated,

especially the cistoscope. And so to drive the point home, he had a final foolproof technique. In a dramatic demonstration, Coza opened a bottle of fresca, something you could certainly find in the average convenience store. He poured the fresca on the ticket and the glue, which was supposed to be the ticket's sacred seal, simply let go. You could peel the whole thing apart, read the numbers, and glue it back together again. The lottery staff were horrified.

It was compelling, let's put it that way. When the demonstration was over, there was no doubt. The lottery canceled their existing contract and put out a new bid. John Coase's company, Scientific Games, won the contract. Their product, which used heavy paper, an indentation-free printer, and of course, that shiny metallic film became the world's first scratch ticket. Coming up, how the scratch ticket changed gambling forever. Hello, this is Karen Frazier from Tampa, Florida, and you're listening to Through Line from NPR. I love the We the People series.

Thank you for putting it together. Part 3. Instant Insanity John Koosa got his big break. The Massachusetts lottery chose his company's game to be sold statewide. The scratch ticket. Now, mind you, this was the very first ticket. As you can see, it was not very artistic. Cosa kept one of those original tickets, preserved like a rare plant specimen in a block of solid resin? Yeah, I mean, the first ticket looks more like a receipt or something. It's not very glamorous looking at all.

It's not glamorous at all. Very boxy and wordy. It says, one in five tickets wins. And then it says, using edge of coin, rub square spot at right. And the number appears. So we had to tell people that. So rub the spot, then rub the four round spots. And if four matches, you win $10,000. And with three, you win a thousand and two, you win $10. And one match you've got two free tickets. Wow. I love that you have to explain on there that you have to use a coin and voila, a number will appear.

I like the fact that you had to explain that is hilarious. Absolutely. Nobody had seen a ticket like this before in a state lottery. On May 29th, 1974, just over 50 years ago, people walked into convenience stores and gas stations around the state and saw that ticket. Could you just introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Geraldine Stewart. I live in Springfield, Massachusetts. And can you take me back to 1974 and how you first heard about this

thing called an instant ticket. I don't remember exactly how I heard about it. I'm sure it was on the news. So I thought I would go out and buy a ticket. Do you remember the store you went to? I believe it was the Pride Station in East Long Meadow. It's a gas station and they also sell lottery tickets there. So I thought, well, hey, I could use that, so I'll try it. And I was lucky.

Stuart won $1,000 on that first ticket. And she wasn't the only one playing. These people were ready. They knew what was coming. Like they were lined up in the morning when you opened? Yep, lined up. In 1974, Glenn Mayette ran a country store in Hanover, Mass. People would scratch them immediately on the counter.

Some would take two steps away and scratch it on an ice cream chest. Some would feel like they had to go outside and sit in their car. He remembers the very first customer of the day was a lottery regular, and she just kept coming back up for more tickets than going back to scratch them in the freezer section. It was just crazy. It's like I thought she was going to lose her mind. The appeal of the instant game is the same appeal as the slot machine. There's no waiting. So if you don't win, you can always try again. And if you do win, well, now you've got more money to play with. It was self-feeding in a way that no lottery

had ever been before. One liquor store owner described the scene as instant insanity. A pharmacy set up a separate sales counter at the back of the store just for lottery tickets so non-lottery customers wouldn't be disturbed by the unruly crowds. Within a day, stores across the state had to run out of

tickets and were waiting to be resupplied. People just like it fast. They don't want to wait. It's the drama in it. It's like fast food. You go pull up at McDonald's, you don't even have to get out of your car. Give me this, that, and the other thing, fast and snappy. Sometimes, well, if I scratch the ticket, if I'm sitting in my car after I buy it, will it be a winner? Or will it be a winner when I scratch it when I'm home? You just think of all these crazy things that now hopefully you're a winner. That first ticket also had a secondary game on it where you scratched a spot to reveal

a single letter. If you then collected all the letters to spell the word instant, you won $10,000. The catch, which was not well advertised, was that only one out of every half million tickets had the letter S, sending players with all the other letters on a frantic statewide search for stores that were rumored to have the mythical S. The state sold over 20 million tickets in two months. Did you realize that you had created something that would be huge? Absolutely.

That would spread. In fact, when I submitted the business plan to our local bank, I had predicted that we would sell $6 million in tickets the first year. And the vice president of the bank that I was working with at the time, he said, I can't submit this to the loan committee. They will just laugh at this. So we cut it back to a million, and the first year sales was $6 million. Wow.

And that was because the other lotteries in 75, I think it was five or six other state lotteries simultaneously started instant games. The other states had waited for someone else to take the plunge, but once they saw what was happening in Massachusetts, they jumped right in. We knew hit the world by the tail. Do you still play scratch tickets?

Oh, sure. I haven't been as lucky though. Again, Geraldine Stewart, the thousand dollar winner. Here's the question, I guess. Do you think you've spent more than a thousand dollars on lottery tickets at this point? Yes, absolutely. And I wanted to tell you that my son never bought a scratch ticket in his life and he's 50.

And he decided a day ago, he had some extra money. So he bought a ticket. He won $500 on that one ticket, his first scratch ticket, and he won $500. Did you tell your son that he should quit while he's ahead and keep the money from that first ticket and never buy another? No. Now I know my son. Today Americans spend over $100 billion a year on lottery tickets.

Almost two-thirds of that total is spent just on scratch tickets. Yes, the Powerball jackpots are what you see in the window of the convenience store. They get more press and the keynote numbers are always flashing on the TV screen in the window of the convenience store. They get more press, and the keynote numbers are always flashing on the TV screen in the corner. But the scratch ticket is the bread and butter, day in, day out game that keeps the money flowing. We spend more on scratch tickets than we do on movie tickets, concert tickets, and sports tickets combined. At $5, $20, maybe $50 a pop,

that is a lot of scratch tickets. And do you come in here every day? Of course I do. I live right across the street. Joe's Market in Quincy is one of the busiest lottery retailers in Massachusetts. It has all your convenience store staples, but the area behind the counter

is dominated by scratch tickets. At least 50 different clear plastic boxes, all numbered, and all dangling colorful tickets. For every hardcore player I meet, there are many, many casual players. It's a lottery, though. Usually cigarettes and the newspapers. The people who stop by for cigarettes or to get cash from the ATM for the car wash.

And the tickets are right there. So why not try your luck? Have you, do you play other lottery games or just scratch tickets? Just scratch tickets. I met a lot of those people. Why this ticket of all the options up there? Because it caught my attention and I just decided to buy it. It was a whim. Yeah. If I win, I share with you, right? If I lose, you share with me. And what are you

playing today? $20 cash word and two $10 ones. How do you pick, I mean there's so many tickets up there. These games have changed since 1974 in important ways. They're not the same boxy, wordy ticket with just four spots to scratch and a max prize of $10,000. But the basic appeal remains the same. It's just been a hit. Scratch tickets. People want scratch tickets. Absolutely. You want to win one spot. Is that why you still play? Yeah, lack of brains.

One of those things. There is this innocuous quality to scratch tickets. They don't really feel like gambling at all. When I was a kid, my stepdad's family would throw a big Easter party, but the prize for the egg hunt was not candy or knickknacks. It was scratch tickets. Every kid ended the hunt with a lap full of scratch tickets.

I've heard so many stories like this. The stocking stuffers, the work party gifts. These tickets have found their way into every corner of life. And of course, nowhere is that more true than the place where it all began. Because, all right, could you tell me about this dream involving the number two? I just scratched a two and underneath it was four million.

But I mean, like I said, it's a dream. But you put some weight in it. True, you know. You want to believe that. That's it for this week's show. I'm Rant Abdelfattah. I'm Ramtin Adablui, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. This episode was produced by me, and me, and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Kadiyama, Sarah Wyman, Irene Noguchi.

Thanks to Ian Kass for bringing us this amazing story. But it doesn't end here. This is just the first episode of a longer series from GBH News called Scratch & Win, where Ian follows the rise of scratch tickets to the present day. You can listen to the other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks also to Isabelle Hibbard and Lacey Roberts, who produced and edited the story for Scratch and Win. And to editorial supervisor, Jennifer McKim, with support from Ryan Alderman. Mae Lay is the project manager,

and the executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. Thanks also to Jeanette Oakes, Keandre Starling, Johanna Sturge, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. This episode was engineered by Ian Kass and Robert Rodriguez. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, write us at Thrueline at NPR.org. And if you don't already, please follow us on Apple, Spotify, and the NPR app.

That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.