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THE LOTTERY - IT MARKS SENSE
by
Francis Townsend: 
francis.townsend@bigfoot.com
When you fill in your UK National Lottery slip have you ever thought that you are perpetuating the memory of the standard Punched Card, (7 3/8" by 3 1/4" used in Hollerith, IBM and other machines), as used the world over. If you now examine a National Lottery entry slip you will find the length and breadth are the same. This can be proved by the fact that a lottery slip fits exactly into a card punch. Obviously the thickness is different as one was 'card' and the other is 'paper'. The thickness was important to the punched card as they were fed into a machine as a pile of cards and required exact thickness so that only one card was entered at a time. In the case if the lottery slip, as it is manually entered one at a time, the thickness is not so important.
The principal of marking a card/slip with information is also not new. Mark Sensing, as it was known, was used on punched cards 50 years ago. The cards were printed with boxes very similar to the lottery slip.
What is more interesting is that the pitching of the rows on the lottery slip is the same as rows on a punched card. The main difference is the pitching of columns and on a Mark Sense card the marks spanned three columns. The column pitching is not important as the lottery reader is synchronised by strobe marks, the black marks on the edge of the lottery slip. Although the lottery slips use an optical method of reading the marks within the boxes, the original Mark Sensing was more primitive. Mark Sensing required the mark on the card to be made with a soft lead pencil. The pencil lead is conductive so electrical sensors (brushes) scanned adjacent columns. Actually three columns were used, the two outside referenced to the centre. When a mark was sensed it completed an electrical circuit controlling the grid of a thermionic valve, the output being used to control a relay.
So the next time you fill in your lottery slip think of the ubiquitous punched card.
