Writer-Inventor Hopes His Device Hits It Big With Lotto Players : Invention: A hand-held tool randomly selects numbers and marks them on a Lotto card. The New Yorker who designed it thinks it’s his key to riches.
Enticed by a multimillion-dollar Lotto jackpot, struggling writer Lanny Turner grabbed $50 worth of blank game cards three years ago, went home to his small Greenwich Village apartment and filled in his picks.
While tediously blacking the required six boxes per game, “I started going nuts” thinking of lucky numbers, he recalled recently. “Once you begin filling in those squares, you see patterns and start brooding: ‘No, I used this number too many times already.’
“So I figured there had to be a better way” to mark Lotto slips, Turner said. “And I sat down and came up with a better way.”
Turner’s solution is a hand-held, less-than-$5 mechanical device he calls “Lotto Luck.” The lucky charm, which recently received a U.S. patent, generates six random numbers and can instantly blacken the corresponding boxes on a bet slip. The inventor has crafted a working model and is searching for a manufacturing and marketing partner.
Today, Turner fantasizes no more about winning millions through betting. He believes he is going to strike it rich via his betting gadget.
“I see myself making a substantial amount of millions,” the 47-year-old inventor said recently as he heated up a cup of instant coffee in his microwave. On one kitchen counter sat his tidy lab: a lathe, a vacuum cleaner and assorted design implements.
A Chicago native with a strong hometown accent, the shaggy-haired and laid-back inventor moved to New York more than 20 years ago to study film writing. Odd jobs since have included taxi driver, department store clerk and “gofer-chauffeur.”
His numerous screenplays, poems and short stories remain unpublished, but in recent years, Turner said, he has made a living as a business consultant, linking friends with deals.
Turner remembers vividly the night the Lotto Luck idea flashed. “My mind just flies when I consider how to solve a problem,” he said. “I stopped filling out the bet slips, and drew sketches. It was probably late, after midnight. It took me 40 minutes to think the problem out, and only a short time to draw it.”
Waking the next morning, the inventor vowed to himself that he would persevere. Over the next six months, Turner labored to build a working prototype of his dream. He taught himself about tools, plastic and adhesives. He went to the library, consulted experts. While in his kitchen lab, “sometimes I’d work 18 hours straight, from 8 in the morning to 2 in the morning, and listen to opera” all the while, he said.
The final design is rather simple. Lotto Luck is a small, plastic box that consists of upper and lower chambers. The top chamber has a floor with 54 holes--corresponding to the 54 possible numbers in the weekly New York Lotto. Six BBs are locked in the chamber. The bottom portion, or main body, has 54 cylindrical holes--each one filled with a thin rod tipped with ink.
To use, the bettor first shakes the box, causing the BBs to fall randomly through six holes into shallow slots. Then the bettor holds the device exactly over a blank betting slip and presses down: The top chamber descends to push on the balls, and the balls, in turn, force down a series of rods in the lower chamber so that the tips mark the card at contact points.
The box is sized to fit over the Lotto 54 game slip, and the holes and pins are spaced to mimic the betting grid--six rows of nine. A container with a stamp pad houses the entire reusable unit.
Although there are other gadgets on the market that generate random series of numbers--such as calculators, pens, watches and even vending machines--none automatically prints the numbers on an official betting slip, Turner said. He said he also considers his device “a hands-on, fun experience.”
True, last April New York State did introduce “Quick Pick,” a computer that generates random numbers for Lotto players who do not have the time to select their own digits. Quick Pick instantly prints the numbers on a Lotto ticket too.
Yet Turner believes many players do not trust the state’s we’ll-pick-for-you option. “Quick Pick is too impersonal, too high tech,” the inventor said.
Lottery experts’ reaction to Turner’s idea is mixed.
Herb Whiton, a New York-based licensing executive, thinks it is a potential winner. Whiton’s company, Licensing Development Group, has invested in its development and is seeking to interest a liquor, cigarette or card company that distributes in New York State Lotto outlets to manufacture and sell the device. “They could sell it at a nitty-gritty price of $2 to $5--it’s a ‘no-brainer’ to use,” he said. A company also might give it away as an advertising gimmick, he said.
“There’s no need for Lotto Luck whatsoever,” philosophized Whiton. “But there’s no need for someone to have the same shirt in 40 colors, either. It’s desire. And I think there’s a desire on the part of many gamblers for a rabbit’s foot to help them.”
Michael Carr, president of the North American State and Provincial Lotteries Assn. and commissioner of Michigan’s lottery, is more negative: “I don’t see any real rush to buy that kind of product. Most people don’t have problems marking six numbers.”
Carr added that many bettors like to play lucky numbers--birthdays, telephone numbers, addresses--or find an idiosyncratic approach. One player in Michigan “scattered papers with numbers on them on his floor. The first six numbers his cat stepped on, he wagered. He hit, then he rented the cat out.”
For his part, Turner remains confident of his eventual windfall. He believes variations of his product can be marketed to the 31 states with lotteries, as well as foreign countries. Last year, more than $17 billion was wagered on state lotteries, Carr said.
Turner said he will buy a boat and a larger apartment if Lotto Luck clicks, but win or lose, he will continue to write and invent. “I like making things,” he said. Current projects: an improved loudspeaker, an anti-wobble table leg and a spill-proof ice tray.