Only a handful of companies around the world manufacture lottery drawing machines, and one of those companies, Smartplay International, has been designing and building the machines in New Jersey for more than three decades.
Since 1993, Smartplay International has manufactured lottery drawing machines for games including Powerball, Mega Millions and New Jersey's daily lottery drawings. The company employs about 40 people and oversees every detail of the production process.
The machines are familiar to anyone who has watched a lottery drawing on television, with numbered balls bouncing around before the winning numbers are selected. While winning depends on luck, ensuring those drawings are fair comes down to precise engineering.
"Over the last 33 years, we have become the world's dominant supplier of lottery drawing machines and digital drawing systems," said Tom Markert, president of Smartplay International.
With lottery drawings, randomness is critical.
"There's two different methods of selecting a ball, it's either a gravity select or it's an air mix machine. It uses a mechanical mixing to create chaos in the mixing chamber, to create what is accepted as a random result," he said.
Whether a machine uses gravity or air to select numbers, the margin for error is extremely small. Even the lottery balls themselves must meet strict specifications and correspond with computerized systems used during drawings.
"The lightest to the heaviest ball within any given set has to have less than a 1% variance, so that means it's 15,000th of a gram difference between the lightest and heaviest ball within each set," Markert said.
The company handles nearly every aspect of production in-house, including manufacturing the balls, woodworking, metal fabrication and wiring. The process is heavily regulated to help ensure fairness and reliability.
Since all of the machines are handmade, it typically takes 10 to 12 weeks to complete one machine. The company makes approximately 150 machines per year.
Those machines are shipped around the globe and used for everything from lottery drawings to game shows and professional sports drafts.
So the next time winning numbers appear on a screen, there's a good chance the machine behind the drawing began its journey right here in New Jersey.
