History of Bingo
Bingo can trace its origins back the 15th century Italian Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia. After the unification of the Italian states in 1530 the central government organised a state lottery and by the 18th century the game was played on cards marked with different arrangements of numbers in rows and columns. During the 19th century similar games were played across Europe and in Germany lotto card games were designed as educational tools for young children to teach multiplication and history.
The modern game of Bingo was invented by struggling American toymaker Edwin S. Lowe. One winter night in 1929 Lowe was traveling to Jacksonville, Georgia, when he stopped at a country carnival. Although most of the booths were closed for the night he found one tent packed to capacity with people playing ‘Beano’. In this game the caller drew numbered wooden discs from a box and players marked their cards by placing a bean on the called numbers. That the crowds stayed until the early hours of the morning greatly impressed Lowe and the game operator, whose name is lost to history, explained he saw the game at a carnival in Germany. With a few alterations and a change of name to ‘Beano’ he had brought the game to America and had enjoyed a raging success every since.
After returning home Lowe organised Beano games for his friends at his New York apartment using a rubber stamp to mark the cards. One evening a player completed a line and in her excitement shrieked ‘Bingo’ instead of Beano and the name was born. Lowe knew he had found a way to save his failing business and quickly marketed two games, a 12-card game that cost $1 and a 24-card game for twice the price. Bingo was a huge success and many competitors manufactured imitations. Rather than engage in lengthy litigations Lowe only asked that his competitors pay him $1 a year and to call the games ‘Bingo’.
A short time after Bingo was launched on the toy market a priest from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania contacted Lowe with a problem. His church needed money and he was organising Bingo games to raise funds. However, even with the 24-card set there were usually several winners for each game. To make the fund-raising more profitable he needed more cards to reduce the winners. Lowe employed a professor of mathematics at Colombia University named Carl Leffler to produce 6,000 different Bingo cards. Leffler toiled at the difficult task and although he did produce the cards the work drove him insane.
However, the expanded Bingo was an efficient money-raiser and soon thousands of Bingo fundraising events were played weekly across North America. Today, it is estimated that North Americans spend $90 million on Bingo every week.
In the News Archives
