ABSTRACT
On Christmas Day in 2002 West Virginian Jack Whittaker made national and international headlines by becoming the world’s biggest lottery winner. Whittaker received $170 million in a lump-sum payout from the multistate Powerball lottery, and said he planned to share the winnings with his family, a sentiment that has historically been given by American lottery winners. Exactly 230 years earlier, in the 1772 English State Lottery, the winner of the £10,000 prize was a New York merchant named Thomas Fisher who it was said “generously gave” a quarter of his earnings to his brother and nephew. 1
