A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins, Volume II (of 2)

In the years 1572 and 1588, Louis de Gonzague, duke de Nivernois and Rethelois, established a blanque at Paris, for the purpose of giving marriage portions to poor virtuous young women belonging to his estates. No lottery was ever drawn with so much ceremony and parade. Before the drawing, which began every year on Palm Sunday, mass was said; the servants employed were obliged to swear that they would act in a faithful and impartial manner; and even Sextus V. gave to those who should promote this good work remission of their sins. The prize tickets were inscribed as follows: Dieu vous a élue, or Dieu vous console. The former ensured to the young woman who drew it 500 francs, which were paid to her on her wedding-day; the latter was the inscription of blanks, but suggested the hope of being more fortunate the year following1030.

This example induced ladies of quality from time to time to establish similar blanques (lotteries) for benevolent purposes. Some destined the profit to the building or repairing of certain churches and convents. Three ladies, whose names history has not thought proper to communicate, set on foot a lottery containing a certain number of tickets at forty sous each, and employed the gain in redeeming, by means of the Mathurines or Patres, as they were called, persons who had fallen into slavery among the Turks. On one occasion a blanque or lottery of a very singular nature was instituted by some ladies, in order to raise a fund for their spiritual guide or confessor, who had been chosen bishop, but had no property, that they might purchase for him a carriage and horses, with every thing necessary to support his ecclesiastical dignity. Each of these grateful ladies was obliged to procure or present to him the article announced by the ticket she had drawn, “pour le remercier, par cette petite largesse, pour le bon ordre qu’il avoit apporté à leurs consciences.”

But these games of chance occur much oftener in the French history, as the means employed to make valuable presents to ladies and other persons of distinction. The largest, in all probability, is that by which Cardinal Mazarine endeavoured to increase his splendour, and render himself more popular among the courtiers. The tickets were distributed as presents; each was a prize, and the prizes were rarities of various kinds, and of different values. This, says the historian, was perhaps the first time that fortune did good to all and hurt to no one1031.

That these games of chance became in the middle of the seventeenth century lotteries, in the proper sense of the word, is unanimously asserted by all the French historians who have touched on this subject, though in some circumstances they differ from each other. In the year 1644, Laurence Tonti came from Naples to Paris, and during a scarcity of money which then prevailed, proposed that kind of life-rents or annuities which at present are named after him Tontines, though they were used in Italy long before his time. But after tedious disputes in regard to his proposal, which was at length rejected, he gave in its stead a new plan for a large blanque, or lottery, which in 1656 obtained the royal approbation. It was to consist of 50,000 tickets, each at two Louis d’ors, so that the whole receipt would amount to 1,100,000 livres; but it is to be recollected that a Louis d’or at that time was only eleven livres. Of this sum 540,000 livres were to be deducted for building a stone bridge and an aqueduct. The expenses of the blanque were estimated at 60,000 livres, and the remaining 500,000 were to be divided into prizes, the highest of which was 30,000 livres. But this blanque royale, for so it was called, was never filled up, and consequently never drawn. On this account it was found necessary to construct a wooden bridge in the room of that which had been burnt. As complaints were often made by mercantile people in regard to the disposal of merchandise in this manner, which had been hitherto permitted, and as this practice had evidently injured the blanque royale, the former in the month of January 1658 was entirely forbidden.

In the year 1660, when the conclusion of peace and the marriage of Louis XIV. were celebrated, the first lottery on the plan of Tonti was set on foot at Paris. It was drawn publicly under the inspection of the police. A ticket cost only a Louis d’or, and the highest prize was 100,000 livres. This was won by the king himself; but he would not receive it, and left it to the next lottery in which he had no ticket1032. This was soon followed by several others. On that account, in the year 1661, all private lotteries were expressly forbidden under severe penalties, and this prohibition was repeated in 1670, 1681, 1687, and 17001033. Since that time there have been no other lotteries but the loteries royales, the profits of which were, in general, applied to public buildings, as was the case in regard to the magnificent church of St. Sulpice, and on that account they met with great support.

Sauval, and some others, ascribe the introduction of lotteries to a person from Lyons, named De Chuyes, who by profession was a gold-beater, but had a great knowledge of trade. He afterwards undertook long sea voyages, and published a book entitled, La Guide des Chemins de Paris, redigée par ordre alphabetique. His name however does not occur in any of the king’s patents, but that only of Tonti.

This De Chuyes, according to Sauval, first proposed the name lottery, then usual in Italy, which however the other persons concerned did not approve. In particular, the well-known De Vaugelas, who had been chosen director of the undertaking, and who thereby hoped to pay his debts, strongly opposed it, and recommended the title blanque royale, though, in consequence of the many deceptions practised in the old games of chance known under that name, it was not likely to become popular. This much is certain, that the name lottery was first used in France about the year 1658; for the order before-mentioned of 1656 has the name blanque, but in that of 1658, the word lottery occurs for the first time, and in that of 1661 we find espèce de blanque et loterie, and in that of 1670, loteries et blanques.

It is certain that the name was much earlier used in Italy and other countries, though Varchi employs only the word Lotto. I am acquainted with no older mention of the name Lottery than that in the passage quoted by Menage, from a letter of Christopher Longolius, or, as he is called by the French, Longueuil. It certainly seems to show that lotteries, in the first half of the sixteenth century, were new; but I doubt much whether it can be proved from it that the name is of French, and not Italian extraction, as Menage thinks, because Longolius generally gave himself out as a Frenchman, though he was born at Mechlin in 1490. As the name is much newer in France, and as the letter was written from Padua, where Longolius died in 1522, it is far more probable that the name had its origin in Italy1034.

In the last place, this letter was written a short time before Longolius’s death; for he mentions the election of pope Adrian, which took place the same year.

The name lottery has been used also by Simon Majolus, who describes the oldest manner in which it was conducted1035; but I have not been able to find at what time this Italian ecclesiastic wrote, though in all probability about the end of the sixteenth century. However it is still doubtful whether he was the author of the portion of the work referred to; for it is known that the greater part of the Dies Caniculares, published under his name, was written by Petrus Draudius, who died in the year 1630.

The word Lot, in many ancient as well as modern languages, and particularly in the English, Swedish, Danish and Dutch, has the same signification as sors, and is evidently the lotto of the Italians, and the los or loos of the Germans; consequently there is no proof that the word lottery is of French extraction, as Menage has supposed1036.

In England the first lottery was proposed in the years 1567 and 1568, and, as the historian says, held at the west door of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and was drawn day and night1037, from the 11th of January 1569, to the 6th of May the same year. It contained 400,000 tickets, at ten shillings each. The prizes consisted partly in money, and partly of silver plate and other articles. The net profit was to be employed in improving the English harbours. The Antiquarian Society of London have still in their possession the original scheme, as it was then printed1038; from which it appears that the name lottery was at that time used in England. [In the year 1612 a lottery was drawn for the benefit of the English colonies in Virginia; permission was granted by special favour of king James I.; the largest prize in which, being silver-plate to the value of 4000 crowns, fell to the share of a tailor. In 1620 lotteries were suspended, in consequence of a representation from the House of Commons that they were prejudicial to the morals of the nation; but one was afterwards permitted in 1630, by a special license from king Charles I., in aid of the expenses of a project for conveying water to London; and Anderson1039 says that this is the first time that lotteries are mentioned either in the Fœdera or Statutes.

In the reign of Charles II., one of the methods resorted to by that monarch to reward the officers who had remained faithful to his cause, was to give them grants of plate and other valuables, with permission to dispose of them by a lottery. This gave rise to various schemes, under the titles of royal-oak and twelve-penny lotteries, &c.; which were sanctioned by government, as we learn by the following advertisement, which appeared soon after the Restoration: – “This is to give notice, that any persons who are desirous to farm any of the counties within the kingdom of England or dominion of Wales, in order to the setting up of a plate lottery, or any other lottery whatsoever, may repair to the lottery-office in Mermaid-court, over against the mews, where they may contract with the trustees commissioned by his majesty’s letters patent for the management of the said patent, on behalf of the truly loyal indigent officers.”

In 1694, a loan of a million was raised by the sale of tickets at £10 each, the prizes in which were funded at the rate of 4 per cent. for sixteen years certain. In the reign of queen Anne lotteries were forbidden as hurtful, but soon after they were again permitted under a variety of conditions, and were commonly for terminable annuities, to which both blanks and prizes became entitled at different rates; thus in 1710, the lottery consisted of 150,000 tickets, valued at £10 each; every ticket being entitled to an annuity for thirty-two years, the blanks at 14s. per annum, and the prizes to various annuities, from £5 to £1000. Tickets appear to have been first divided into shares during the administration of Sir Robert Walpole.

In 1746, a loan of three millions was raised on 4 per cent. annuities, and a lottery of 50,000 tickets at £10 each; and in 1747, one million was raised by the sale of 100,000 tickets, the prizes in which were founded in perpetual annuities, at the rate of 4 per cent. per annum. During the same century government constantly availed itself of this means to raise money for various public works, of which the British Museum and Westminster-bridge are well-known examples.

Probably the last occasion on which this taste for gambling was thus made use of occurred in 1780, when every subscriber of £1000 towards a loan of twelve millions, at 4 per cent., received a bonus of four lottery tickets, the intrinsic value of each of which was £10.

In 1778 an act was passed obliging every person who kept a lottery-office to take out an annual license, and to pay £50 for the same, a measure which reduced the number of lottery-offices from 400 to 51.

In 1823, however, the last act sanctioned by parliament for the sale of lottery tickets, contained provisions for putting down all state and private lotteries, and for rendering illegal the sale, in this kingdom, of all tickets or shares of tickets in any foreign lottery.]

A lottery was drawn at Amsterdam in 1549, the profit of which was employed in building a church steeple1040; and another was drawn at Delft in 1595. I was informed by Professor Fiorillo that there is still preserved at Amsterdam, in the hospital for old men, oude mannen huys, a beautiful painting by David Vinckenbooms, eight feet in height and fourteen in breadth, which represents the drawing of a lottery in the night-time. The artist is said to have been born in the year 1578.

This game of chance must have been known also at an early period in Germany; for, in the year 1521, a lottery was established by the council at Osnaburg, and is mentioned in a work published in 1582; but the prizes consisted only in articles of merchandise. The citizens of Hamburg having proposed a lottery, according to the Dutch manner, for the purpose of building a house of correction, the magistrates gave their approbation in the month of November 1611, and in 1615 it was drawn. At Nuremberg the first lottery seems to have been drawn in the year 1715. At any rate, Von Murr, in his Description of the remarkable things in that city, mentions an engraving with the following title: “Representation of the Lotto publico, which was drawn in the large hall of the council-house, at Nuremberg, anno 1715.” It is certain that we are not here to understand the so-called Italian lotto, but a common lottery, as the former was not introduced into Germany till a much later period. At Berlin the first lottery was drawn in the month of July 1740. It consisted only of one class of prizes, as was probably the case with all lotteries at first. It contained 20,000 tickets, each of which cost five dollars; so that the whole income amounted to 100,000 dollars. There were 4028 prizes, the largest of which was a house worth 24,000 dollars.

The ill-famed Italian or Genoese lottery was, as its name shows, an invention of the Genoese1041, and arose from the mode in which the members of the senate were elected; for when that republic existed in a state of freedom, the names of the eligible candidates were thrown into a vessel called seminario, or, in modern times, into a wheel of fortune; and during the drawing of them it was customary for people to lay bets in regard to those who might be successful. That is to say, one chose the names of two or three nobili, for these only could be elected, and ventured upon them, according to pleasure, a piece of money; while, on the other hand, the opposite party, or the undertaker of the bank, who had the means of forming a pretty accurate conjecture in regard to the names that would be drawn, doubled the stakes several times. Afterwards the state itself undertook the bank for these bets, which was attended with so much advantage; and the drawing of the names was performed with great ceremony. The venerabile was exposed, and high mass was celebrated, at which all the candidates were obliged to be present.

A member of the senate, named Benedetto Gentile, is said to have first introduced this lottery, in the year 1620; and it is added, that the name of Gentile having never been drawn, the people took it into their heads that he and his names had been carried away by the devil, in the same manner as Schwartz, the inventor of gunpowder, as a punishment for this unfortunate invention. But at length, the wheel being taken to pieces in order to be mended, the name, which by some accident had never been drawn, was found concealed in it. Hence it may be easily seen how this game of chance was formed, by introducing numbers instead of the names of the nobility.

However, if I am not mistaken, it continued to be peculiar to the Genoese till nearly the middle of the eighteenth century. But as all travellers spoke of this lotto di Genoa, and many wished to try their fortune in it, the Genoese, for their own benefit, established in many large towns commissioners, whose business was to dispose of tickets, and to pay the prizes to those who had been fortunate.

As an immoderate spirit of gambling was thus excited at Rome, Pope Benedict XIII., who sat on the papal throne from 1724 to 1730, forbade the Genoese lottery, under the pain of banishment to those who gambled in it, and to those who received the money. As this threat however did not remove the evil, the succeeding pope, Clement XII., who died in 1740, followed the example of our German princes, and caused a lottery to be established even at Rome. Since that time, permission for the same purpose has been renewed from year to year.

It was not till a much later period that the Genoese lottery was introduced into Germany. According to the account of J. A. Kalzabigi, who had made himself known in Italy by many projects, and was appointed a Prussian privy-counsellor of commerce and finance, the first was drawn at Berlin on the 31st of August 1763. In 1769, one was established in the principality of Anspach and Bayreuth, where it was continued till the year 1788. In 1774, a person named Wenceslaus Maurer came to Neufchatel, with permission from the king, and established a Lotto there much against the will of the prudent inhabitants; but some one having won a capital prize, for which the undertakers ought to have paid 30,000 francs, after procrastinating as long as they could, under various pretences, they at length became bankrupts, and made their escape from the country.

These pernicious lotteries continued till the end of the eighteenth century, when they were almost everywhere abolished and forbidden. They are now permitted only in a very few states, which are not able to give up the paltry income derived from them. To the honour of the Hanoverian government, no Lotto was ever introduced into it, though many foreigners have offered large sums for permission to cheat the people in this manner. Those who wish to see the prohibitions issued against the Lotto, after making a great part of the people lazy, indigent and thievish, may find them by the help of the index in Schlötzer’s Staats-Anzeigen.

Si son exécrable mémoireParvient à la posterité,C’est que le crime, aussi bien que la gloire,Conduit à l’immortalité.

[The only lottery at present existing in England under the sanction of the government is the art-union of London. The first institution of this kind in Great Britain originated at Edinburgh in 1836, from the models existing in Prussia, formed under the patronage of the king and his minister Von Humboldt, about the year 1825. The money annually subscribed is expended in pictures, sculptures, &c. It is divided by the committee into several portions or prizes, from £10 to £400, and on a certain day the prizes are distributed among the subscribers in the ordinary way. The prize-holders are then allowed to select works of art to the value of their respective prizes from any of the five annual exhibitions of works of art in the metropolis for the current year. A portion of the total sum subscribed is set aside and applied to the purpose of engraving and printing some work of art, a copy of which is given to each subscriber. Hence, by the combination of a very large number of persons to subscribe for this one work of art, and the avoidance of risk, incidental expenses, and publisher’s profits, the print, though at least equal to what would be charged a guinea (the amount of subscription) in the ordinary course of trade, is supplied to the subscribers at so small a cost as to leave by far the greater part of the subscribed sum as a fund applicable to the purchase of prizes. Several similar associations have been since formed on a smaller scale in other parts of Great Britain.]

BOLOGNA STONE

The Bologna stone, in consequence of its property of shining in the dark, which was observed by accident, has given rise to many laborious researches and experiments, and to writings almost without number, which have not so much enlarged our knowledge of light, as proved that all the hypotheses hitherto offered by philosophers for explaining it, if not entirely false, are at least insufficient and uncertain. The history of this stone, therefore, though not unknown, deserves to be here repeated, especially as many parts of it require to be rectified.

As a complete description of it would be superfluous to mineralogists, it may be sufficient to remark, that this kind of stone is found in plates or single pieces, which in general are more or less of a conical form, have a dirty white or semi-transparent water-colour, and a foliaceous structure, which is observed on its being broken, though the stone, considered in another direction, appears to be fibrous. The surface of single pieces is uneven. But what distinguishes this species from the gypseous spars, to which it bears the greatest resemblance, is its extraordinary weight; and this it has in common with all the varieties of heavy spar, to which, according to its component parts, it belongs.

This stone is found on different eminences around Bologna, and particularly on the hill of Paderno, which is situated at the distance of about a German mile from the city, loose, and scattered about between gypseous stones, in a marly earth, some of which is still seen adhering to pieces in my possession. It is found most readily after heavy rains, particularly in the streams which run down the sides of the hill; and it is there collected by persons who sell it at Bologna. In the year 1730, when Keysler was there, a pound of it could be purchased for a paolo1042.

I shall take this opportunity of remarking, that the Bologna stone, according to its external characteristics, heaviness and hardness excepted, has a great similarity to those gypseous spars or selenites which were first described by Lehman1043, and at the time perhaps by him alone; according to whose account, it is mentioned also by Vogel1044 and by Wallerius1045, under the name of Selenites globosus: on the other hand, it has not been mentioned by modern mineralogists under any particular appellation. In the county of Mansfeld it is found in detached masses or single pieces, more or less conical; and, to judge from the earth purposely left on the specimens in my possession, which were picked up in the neighbourhood of Sangershausen, in a yellowish-red sandy clay. The pieces, many of which are round balls, two or three inches in diameter, and others longish rolls, have, externally as well as internally, a grayish colour, appear foliated on the fracture, or seem to consist of cuneiform radii, which meet in the centre of the ball. Many are hollow in the inside; and in this case the ends of the cunei or needles, which have between them a granulated gypsum mixed with a little clay, project into the cavity. Lehman says that the leaves, when placed in a heated stove, emit a hesperus, that is, shine; and this circumstance made Wallerius doubtful whether this selenite did not belong to the fluor-spars; but it is undoubtedly a sulphate of baryta. When the crude stone is put into acids, a very faint effervescence is sometimes observed, arising from foreign matters; but when burnt pieces are employed, this effect is much stronger. It does not crack or break in the fire; but if exposed only a short time to a red heat, it becomes totally opake, whiter, and void of all lustre; it is also more friable, and crumbles to dust in water, exactly in the same manner as bastard lapis specularis. The luminous appearance in a warm stove I did not observe in the few pieces which I subjected to experiment. I was desirous to make this remark, because the mineralogists before-mentioned place globular selenite along with the Bologna stone, to which however it does not belong.

To render it capable of shining in the dark, a piece particularly heavy, foliaceous and pure, must be selected1046. After being made red-hot, it is pounded and reduced to a fine powder, which, by means of a solution of gum-tragacanth, is converted into a kind of paste, and formed into small cakes. When these are dried, they are brought to a state of ignition between coals, and then suffered to cool; after which they are preserved from the air and moisture in a close vessel. If one of these cakes be exposed a few minutes to the light, and then carried into a dark place, it will shine like a burning coal. It appears therefore to attract the light, or to be as it were a light-magnet. This power of emitting light becomes lost in the course of time; but it may be restored at first by heating, and afterwards by exposure again to ignition. I shall pass over the rules necessary to be observed in the numerous experiments made with this stone, as well as the consequences deduced from them. The former may be found in works on chemistry, and the latter in those on natural philosophy.