Decoder Ring | The Scratch-Off Ticket’s Instant Win

Summary

Slow Burn Season 10, Episode: Decoder Ring | The Scratch-Off Ticket’s Instant Win

Host: Ian Koss
Producer: Willa Paskin
Release Date: February 12, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Slow Burn, host Ian Koss delves into the fascinating history and societal impact of scratch-off lottery tickets. Titled "The Scratch-Off Ticket’s Instant Win," the episode explores how these seemingly simple paper tickets revolutionized gambling in America, transforming it from a clandestine activity associated with organized crime to a mainstream, state-sanctioned pastime.

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The Origins of Scratch-Off Tickets

[08:23] Ian Koss:
"Ian Cost has always liked scratch off tickets even before he was legally able to buy them."

Koss shares his early fascination with scratch-off tickets, influenced by his mother's habit of purchasing them during gas station stops. This personal connection sets the stage for a deeper exploration of the ticket’s evolution.

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Encounter at Joe's Market

[08:38] Ian Koss:
"He had a pretty eye-opening experience with them when he went to a convenience store in Quincy, Massachusetts called Joe's Market."

At Joe's Market, Koss observes dedicated gamblers, including a mechanic who spends up to $50 daily on scratch tickets in hopes of a life-changing win. This firsthand observation highlights the addictive allure of instant lotteries.

[09:00] Ian Koss:
"When I met him, I think he was on, like, ticket number six or seven for the day... he's dreaming to get that big one so I can retire."

The mechanic's relentless pursuit underscores the ticket's ability to captivate individuals with the promise of instant wealth, mirroring casino dynamics in a paper format.

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The Birth of Scientific Games

[10:32] Ian Koss:
"John Koza had designed an instant game that he and his partner felt was perfect for the needs of a state lottery."

John Koza, a pioneering computer scientist, collaborated with Dan Bauer to form Scientific Games after the collapse of their initial employer, J&H. Their mission was to legitimize gambling through state lotteries, distancing it from its mob-associated past.

[12:07] John Koza:
"I think I might have been the 12th or 13th in the country."
— Reflecting on his early career in computer science and probability.

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Overcoming Initial Resistance

[15:09] John Koza:
"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."

Despite initial rejections from conservative state lotteries wary of corruption and mob influence, Koza and Bauer persisted. Their breakthrough came with the Massachusetts Lottery, led by Dr. Perrault, a mathematician who understood the scientific principles behind Koza’s designs.

[19:03] Ian Koss:
"Everyone called the lottery director Dr. Perrault... 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."

Dr. Perrault's expertise and openness to innovation were pivotal in adopting the scratch-off ticket model.

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The First Scratch-Off Ticket

[26:22] Ian Koss:
"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."

Koza demonstrated the vulnerabilities of the competing instant game design, using tools like a cystoscope and everyday items like Fresca to reveal hidden numbers. His successful demonstration led to Scientific Games winning the contract and producing the world's first modern scratch-off ticket.

[28:00] John Koza:
"Now, mind you, this was the very first ticket. As you can see, it was not very artistic."

The inaugural ticket was rudimentary, featuring instructions like, "rub the spot, then rub the four round spots." Despite its simplicity, it introduced a new era of instant lottery games.

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Public Reception and Rapid Expansion

[29:05] Ian Koss:
"Could you just introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Geraldine Stewart... I was lucky Stewart won a thousand dollars on that first ticket."

Early users like Geraldine Stewart experienced immediate wins, fueling the tickets' popularity. Store owners reported unprecedented demand, with customers eager to purchase and scratch tickets instantly.

[31:53] Ian Koss:
"We spend more on scratch tickets than we do on concert tickets, than we do on movie tickets, than we do on sports tickets."

The surge in sales demonstrated the massive appeal of scratch-off tickets, surpassing traditional forms of entertainment and gambling.

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Societal Impact and Moral Tensions

[33:02] Ian Koss:
"The lottery was like a giant experiment exposing more Americans to legal gambling than ever before... and it proved immensely popular."

While lotteries thrived, they also sparked moral debates. Concerns about addiction, financial loss, and societal degradation lingered, despite the state lotteries successfully distancing themselves from their criminal past.

[35:17] Ian Koss:
"Almost everyone I talk to... would always have this kind of, like, reservations about it."

This internal conflict reflects the broader societal ambivalence towards gambling—simultaneously embracing its entertainment value while fearing its potential harms.

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Modern Evolution and Ongoing Challenges

[34:35] Ian Koss:
"Massachusetts approved online lottery sales... to compete with all the other forms of gambling that are out there."

As technology advanced, state lotteries adapted by embracing online sales to stay competitive against platforms like FanDuel and DraftKings. Concurrently, concerns about youth gambling prompted the state to fund prevention initiatives.

[35:30] Ian Koss:
"Almost everyone I talk to... would always have this kind of, like, reservations about it... it's fun, it's entertaining, it has this promise of transforming your life, and yet there's so much shame around it."

The episode highlights the ongoing tension between the popularity of gambling and the societal efforts to mitigate its negative effects, emphasizing that this dichotomy is unlikely to resolve anytime soon.

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Conclusion

Ian Koss's exploration of scratch-off tickets in "Decoder Ring" provides a comprehensive look at how a simple innovation reshaped American gambling. From John Koza's groundbreaking work to the widespread adoption and cultural ambivalence surrounding lotteries, the episode encapsulates the intricate dynamics of legality, addiction, and entertainment in the evolution of gambling.

Notable Takeaway:
"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."
— Ian Koss

This quote encapsulates the essence of scratch-off tickets' enduring allure and their significant role in the American gambling landscape.

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Additional Information

For those interested in the full story, Slow Burn Season 10 offers an in-depth eight-episode series titled "Scratch and Win," produced by Scientific Games and GBH News. Listeners can subscribe to Slow Burn on Apple Podcasts or through Slate Plus to access all episodes and exclusive content.

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This summary captures the core discussions, insights, and narratives presented in the episode, providing a comprehensive overview for those who haven't listened.

Transcript

[Willa Paskin]

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[Ian Koss]

Know what else you can't beat?

[Willa Paskin]

The Angel Reese special. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. It's gonna be a high C for me.

[Ian Koss]

Sound good?

[Willa Paskin]

All you have to do to get.

[Ian Koss]

It is beat me in a one on one.

[Willa Paskin]

I'm just playing get the angel re special at McDonald's now.

[Ian Koss]

Ba da ba ba ba. I participate in restaurants for a limited time.

[Willa Paskin]

So when I say gambling to you, like what do you think of Las Vegas?

[Ian Koss]

Casinos, dice, cards, wheels. That's what I picture.

[Willa Paskin]

Ian Coss is a podcaster for WGBH in Boston and he's working on a new series that in its way is about gambles. What you might have noticed is suddenly all around us.

[Ian Koss]

Yeah, it's everywhere. You don't have to be a superstar to spin your favorite slots on Hard Rock Bet.

[Willa Paskin]

Enter a palace of play all your own with Caesar's palace online casino.

[Ian Koss]

I don't really remember somebody firing the starting gun and saying, let's just, let's just do it. Let's just go no holds barred on gambling and let's see what happens.

[Willa Paskin]

BetMGM's got all the sports betting in one place.

[John Koza]

With FanDuel, it's easier than ever to place your bet before the next play.

[Ian Koss]

I think we forget that it took a long time for the ball to get rolling and now it's rolling really quickly.

[Willa Paskin]

60% of Americans gambled at least once last year. We also spent $13 billion on sports betting and more than three times that at casinos. The super bowl was just held at Caesars Superdome, Caesars being both the casino company and the sportsbook. It's the kind of mixing of sports and gambling that would have once been unimaginable. Even just back in the 1960s, things were totally different.

[Ian Koss]

The only casinos in America were in Las Vegas. That was it. There were no tribal casinos. There was no Atlantic City casinos. There was no sports betting, obviously no online poker, prediction markets. So that's like in a couple generations, gone from A world where gambling was something that was mostly run by the mob to something that is a massive, massive industry.

[Willa Paskin]

When people explain the change, they often point to important events chronologically close at hand. Like in 2018, the Supreme Court loosened the restrictions on sports betting, and sports betting is now legal in 38 states. But Ian thinks the broader acceptance of gambling started long before then.

[Ian Koss]

And the thing that does it is state lotteries. The first number is 13. The second number is 32. I think there's something very powerful in taking something that was vice and then putting the legitimacy of the state behind it.

[Willa Paskin]

It's funny because I don't even know that I thought about the lottery as gambling.

[Ian Koss]

It's not the first thing you think of when you think of gambling, and it's almost because it is so innocuous.

[Willa Paskin]

45 of the states in America currently have a lottery. That means they provide their residents with games of total luck. Games on which those residents, in the hopes of making money, even though they mostly just lose money. There's mega millions in Powerball, numbers, drawings and keno. And then there is the most lucrative and popular game of all, the scratch ticket.

[Ian Koss]

I think more than any other form of gambling in the 20th century, just, it kind of put it out there in everyday life.

[Willa Paskin]

The scratch off ticket, that ubiquitous colorful slip of thick paper, that impulse purchase, that stocking stuffer. Was it the thin edge of the wedge leading to contemporary gambling culture?

[Ian Koss]

You know, if you walk into a convenience store, you see that row of scratch tickets behind the counter, you don't think you're walking into a casino, but that's what it is. It's just a slot machine on paper.

[Willa Paskin]

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you're anything like me, you may never have thought very hard about scratch off tickets, but that's part of their power. They're a form of gambling that's just a pedestrian fact of American life. But not so long ago, they were risky and innovative, and when they were first introduced, they became the killer app, the must play game of the state lottery. In this episode, Ian Koss, the host of the new series Scratch and Win, is going to walk us through the history of the scratch off ticket, its invention, its popularization, and its connection to the explosion in gambling that's all around us. So today on Decoder Ring, how did the scratch off ticket hit the jackpot this new year? Why not let audible expand your life by listening explore over 1 million audiobooks, podcasts, and exclusive audible originals that'll inspire and motivate you. I've been listening to Wesley Morris's energetic the Wonder of Stevie all about Stevie Wonder, and I'm sure there's something you'll like to just open the app and tap into your well being with advice and insight from leading influencers, experts and professionals. Whatever your focus or interest, there's a listen for it on Audible. You'll find titles on health, relationships, career, finance, and so much more. Let Audible help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30 day trial at audible.com decoder New members can try Audible now, free for 30 days with your first audiobook included. Visit audible.com decoder or text decoder to 500500 that's audible.com decoder or Text decoder to 500500 who doesn't love the good things in Life? Everyone enjoys a little luxury, but it's not always affordable. Except when it comes to Quince. Quince is the go to for luxury essentials at affordable prices. I have a pair of slim little gold hoop earrings I wear pretty much all the time and I've been working out a cozy fisherman sweater blue that I've been wearing all winter. Quint offers a range of high quality items at prices within reach like 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, washable silk tops and dresses, organic cotton sweaters and 14 karat gold jewelry. Give yourself the luxury you deserve with quint. Go to quint.comdecoder for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E.com decoder to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com decoder Ian Cost has always liked scratch off tickets even before he was legally able to buy them.

[Ian Koss]

My mom used to get them for us when we stopped for gas. There's something about that, the tactile feeling of that film. It feels really good.

[Willa Paskin]

But he had a pretty eye opening experience with them when he went to a convenience store in Quincy, Massachusetts called Joe's Market.

[Ian Koss]

Long time no see. Some convenience stores just seem to like find this niche for themselves that they become lottery destinations and Joe's Market has become one of these stores.

[Willa Paskin]

Joe's is one of the stores that sells the most lottery tickets in the state and Ian didn't have to hang out there long to see people hardcore scratching.

[Ian Koss]

Do you come in here every day? Of course I do. I live right across the street. This guy I met was there on his lunch break. He's A mechanic, and he plays the $50 scratch tickets. I play $50 every day. Have you won yet right there? So far, I already spent 300 bucks on the bucket. There's nothing. When I met him, I think he was on, like, ticket number six or seven for the day. And I watched him, you know, he won 100 bucks on one of those tickets. You got a winner now. 100 ohn. Like, if I won 100 bucks on a scratch ticket, it would be an event. And for him, he's chasing something much bigger than that. I'm dreaming to get that big one so I can retire.

[John Koza]

I'm 75 years old.

[Ian Koss]

And, yeah, so he goes back and spends 100 bucks on more scratch tickets and goes round and round and round, and I watched him spend 500 bucks in one go on scratch tickets. Yesterday, I had 1500 count that. Only about 900 left, 600 already out. And that was one of those things that made me realize, oh, this is a casino by another name run by the state, and it's all on paper.

[Willa Paskin]

States only got into the gambling business in 1964, when New Hampshire started its lottery. The first. A handful of states followed. But as the 1970s dawned, we did not have scratch tickets. And Ian's going to take over from here to tell us how he got them.

[Ian Koss]

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 events, each of which had to happen just so. And I'm going to pick up the chain with a man named John Koza. As a kid in the 1950s, John used jukebox parts to build his own computer.

[John Koza]

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.

[Ian Koss]

Back in a time when computers could be the size of a room, John became one of the country's first PhD students in computer science.

[John Koza]

I think I might have been the 12th or 13th in the country.

[Ian Koss]

When he was still a student, John sold a board game about the intricacies of the electoral college that hit shelves right in time for the 1968 election. It flopped, but not before getting John some attention from a company that made supermarket and gas station giveaway games.

[John Koza]

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.

[Ian Koss]

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.

[John Koza]

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.

[Ian Koss]

So while still chipping away at his PhD, Koza worked with this 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 in the 1960s. That took some doing, but with the stakes fairly low, the security around these games was also fairly low.

[John Koza]

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.

[Ian Koss]

For example, a player might figure out a way to actually see what was printed underneath that scratch off film and where the matching playing cards were.

[John Koza]

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.

[Ian Koss]

I don't know if you were 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?

[John Koza]

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. We had perfected a system that could produce a very, very secure ticket, unpredictable.

[Ian Koss]

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 and H, went bankrupt in December of 1972.

[John Koza]

Cosa was cut loose, which coincidentally was exactly the month when I graduated and got my PhD.

[Ian Koss]

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?

[John Koza]

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.

[Ian Koss]

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 Koza 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. Don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again. This was a shadowy business the state was wading into, and any whiff of irregularity, a fixed drawing, a forged ticket, would shatter the public's trust. Jonathan Cohen is the author of For a Dollar and a State Lotteries in Modern America. They were so concerned about organized crime and this imprimatur of legitimacy that they didn't get, like 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 without innovating, illegal gambling was eating the lottery's lunch. In Massachusetts alone, $2 billion were being gambled illegally every year. So to compete with that, the state lotteries needed to get better, to be more exciting, enticing, frequent, and fresh. And John Koza, the unemployed computer scientist, had the perfect idea for them. The instant ticket. To Coza, 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.

[John Koza]

The director there was a PhD in mathematics. So he happened to really understand the scientific basis for what we were doing.

[Ian Koss]

Everyone called the lottery director Dr. Dr. Perrault. And in addition to being a mathematician, Dr. Perrault 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, Ph.D. 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.

[John Koza]

The Massachusetts Lottery was very innovative. That is, they were prepared to try an instant Game.

[Ian Koss]

There was just one problem.

[John Koza]

They had already given a contract for the Instant Game to another company.

[Willa Paskin]

When we come back, John Koza's scratch off ticket faces some long odds.

[Ian Koss]

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. Welcome to the White Lotus in Thailand. It's a wellness center. You should get a facial.

[John Koza]

The lady in the airport thought you were my dad.

[Ian Koss]

My God.

[Willa Paskin]

The Emmy award winning HBO original series returns.

[Ian Koss]

There has been more crime on the Idol. Well, I'm a little freaked out. What happens in time, it stays in time. What does that mean? It means we're not dead yet. Amen.

[John Koza]

Amen.

[Willa Paskin]

A new season of the HBO original series the White Lotus premieres February 16th.

[Ian Koss]

At 9pm on MAX. I'm Leon Nayfak and I'm the host of Slow Burn Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie all the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting at their typewriters clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the COVID up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in a movie. In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the President? The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Willa Paskin]

So the early 70s seemed to be like John Koza's time to shine. He designed an instant game that he and his partner felt was perfect for the needs of a state lottery. And in Massachusetts, there was a state looking for an instant game, a perfect match, except, well, Ian's going to take it from here.

[Ian Koss]

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 Coza could see immediately that those tickets were deeply flawed.

[John Koza]

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.

[Ian Koss]

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.

[John Koza]

They gave us the tickets. I went back to Ann Arbor, Dan went back to Chicago, and they gave us a week or so.

[Ian Koss]

Armed with his obsessive personality, plus years of experience playing cat and mouse with would be scam artists on his supermarket games, Koza got to work. The competitor's ticket was made of pretty thin paper with flap doors over the hidden numbers held down by glue. Koza'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.

[John Koza]

As I say, they were extremely flimsy tickets.

[Ian Koss]

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.

[John Koza]

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.

[Ian Koss]

Patiently, Koza walked the lottery staff through each potential vulnerability.

[John Koza]

One of them involved a cystoscope, which is a medical device.

[Ian Koss]

A cystoscope 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. Koza used it to peer underneath the ticket's flap doors.

[John Koza]

That was one way in. And these tickets were printed on just really ordinary paper with line printers. A line printer is like a typewriter. It would make a physical bang impression and indent the paper.

[Ian Koss]

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 Koza demonstrated, especially the cystoscope. And so, to drive the point home, he had a final foolproof technique. In a dramatic demonstration, Cosa 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.

[John Koza]

It was compelling, let's put it that way. When the demonstration was over, there was no doubt.

[Ian Koss]

The lottery canceled their existing contract and put out a new bid. John Ko's company, Scientific Games, won the contract. Their product, which used heavy paper, an indentation free printer, and of course, that famous shiny metallic film, became the world's first scratch ticket.

[John Koza]

Now, mind you, this was the very first ticket. As you can see, it was not very artistic.

[Ian Koss]

Koza 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 a receipt.

[John Koza]

Yeah, that's.

[Ian Koss]

It's not very glamorous looking at all.

[John Koza]

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 a 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 doll. And with three, you win 1,000. And two, you win $10 and one match, you got two free tickets.

[Ian Koss]

Wow, I love that. You have to explain on there that you have to use a coin and voila, a number will appear. Like the fact that you have to explain that is hilarious.

[John Koza]

Absolutely. Nobody had seen a ticket like this before in a State Lottery on May.

[Ian Koss]

29, 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. Stewart won a thousand dollars on that first ticket. And she wasn't the only one playing. These people were ready. They knew it was coming. Like they were lined up in the morning when you opened. Yeah. Yep, lined up. In 1974, Glenn Mayette ran a country store in Hanover, mass. People would scratch him 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 then 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 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. Did you realize that you had created something that would be huge?

[John Koza]

Absolutely.

[Ian Koss]

That would spread.

[John Koza]

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.

[Ian Koss]

Wow.

[John Koza]

And that was because the other lotteries in 75, I think there's five or six other state lotteries simultaneously started Instant games.

[Ian Koss]

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.

[John Koza]

We knew we had the world by the tail.

[Willa Paskin]

As the 70s became the 80s, scratch off tickets would keep a hold of the world's tail. The tickets multiplied. There were more games available for longer with a much wider range of payouts and fears about scratch off tickets and the lottery more largely dissipated when you.

[Ian Koss]

Go back and you read, like, newspaper accounts about the launch of lotteries, there is so much fear over what these will do to society. It's like, you know, society is going to fall apart, that you'd have just, like, rampant corruption. You'd have. The mob would be all over the government. Everything would be rigged, broken homes, and, like, you know, everyone, like, spending all their money on it. And so there really was a kind of moral panic. And I think the most important thing that lotteries did to kind of grease the wheels of the gambling machine was that they. They kind of proved the doomsday scenarios wrong. And I don't want to say that there are no harms caused by lotteries, that it's not true. But, like, society didn't fall apart. You know, government didn't collapse. The mob didn't, you know, infiltrate and take over all the lotteries. Like, those worst fears were just not realized.

[Willa Paskin]

The lottery was like a giant experiment exposing more Americans to legal gambling than ever before. And the experiment not only went okay, but it proved immensely popular.

[Ian Koss]

I mean, we spend more on scratch tickets than we do on concert tickets, than we do on movie tickets, than we do on sports tickets.

[Willa Paskin]

We're now in the middle of another such experiment. And as popular as the lottery is, it's now worried about keeping up.

[Ian Koss]

Massachusetts, you know, where I live, approved online lottery sales for the first time in the last year specifically to compete with all the other forms of gambling that are out there. Right. It's like the lottery is going up against, you know, FanDuel and, you know, DraftKings and everything else.

[Willa Paskin]

But around the same time the state made the lottery available online, it also approved funding to help prevent youth problem gambling.

[Ian Koss]

The state is so invested in the success of their lottery that, like, they have to do everything they can to keep it growing and to reach a younger audience. But at the same time, they're like, they're worried about the effects of gambling on young people.

[Willa Paskin]

If you had to describe this kind of core tension around gambling where, like, we kind of love it, but we disdain it. Like, how. How would you describe that tension?

[Ian Koss]

Almost everyone I talk to, even people who are very close to it, would always have this kind of, like, reservations about it. They would come to the convenience store and play their numbers every day, but then they would joke about how they're throwing their money away, talk to the person who helped pioneer, you know, scratch tickets and lotto games. But then they look at sports betting and be like, whoa, that's way too much. That's way too much. And it just seemed weird that, like all of these people carried that kind of divided soul within them, that it's fun, it's entertaining, it has this promise of transforming your life, and yet there's so much shame around it and hand wringing and gloom, and I don't know why that is, why it's so impossible to shake. And I don't think that's gonna go away anytime soon.

[Willa Paskin]

We're just all mixed up about it.

[Ian Koss]

It's all mixed up in there. Yeah.

[Willa Paskin]

And if the history of the Scratch off ticket tells us anything, it's that we can be all mixed up about gambling and even stay all mixed up about gambling. But that's not gonna keep us from gambling. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. I want to direct you to Ian Koss's new eight episode podcast series, Scratch and Win. It's about far more than just Scratch off tickets, and what you've heard is just a small part of the whole intricate and fascinating saga. It relays about the birth of the Massachusetts State Lottery, the biggest state lottery in America. It's coming out weekly right now, and you should really go listen wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode of Decoder Ring was produced by Katie Shepard. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Katie, Evan Chung and Max Friedman. Derek John is Executive producer, Marek Jacob is Senior Technical director. Scratch and Win is a production of GBH News. It's produced by Isabel Hibbard and Ian Coss. It's edited by Lacey Roberts. Its editorial Supervisor is Jennifer McKinn, with support from Ryan Alderman. Mae Lai is the Project manager, and the Executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email [e-mail] and you could also now call us on a fancy new phone number, the Decoder Ring hotline. And that number is 347-460-7281. We love hearing your ideas and we especially enjoyed all the messages we got about our last episode on the 90s swing craze. So please keep them coming. And even better, tell your friends to check the show out. If you aren't already a Slate plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Declaration Decoder Ring show page or visit slate.comdecoder/ to get access wherever you listen. We've been releasing bonus episodes every other episode and we're going to keep doing that, so sign up now. Don't forget Slate plus members also get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads. And you get unlimited access to Slate's website again. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try free or visit slate.comdecoderplus to sign up. See you in two weeks.