Election Day for their enjoyable game of chance; and they quickly realized that if they wanted to bet on paper slips drawn from a pile, there was no need for an election at all. Numbers replaced names of politicians, and by 1700 Genoa was running a lottery that would look very familiar to modern Powerball players. Bettors tried to guess five randomly drawn numbers, with a bigger payoff the more numbers a player matched. Lotteries quickly spread throughout Europe, and from there to North America. During the Revolutionary War, both the Continental Congress and the governments of the states
...more
