You may be surprised to learn that bingo, a game which is massively popular in Western culture, has a long history that stretches back hundreds of years.
Bingo is a combination of many different gambling games, but its nearest ancestor is an Italian game called Lo Giuoco Code Lotto that was played in the 1500s. It later spread to France where the game had evolved to use playing cards, tokens and reading out of numbers. In the 1800s it became popular in Germany where, oddly, it was used as an educational tool to teach children multiplication tables and spelling.
The game didn’t catch on in America until the early 20th Century. In 1929 a toy salesman from New York called Edwin Lowe came across a game called ‘Beano’ at a carnival in Atlanta. A caller yelled a number and if the players found the number on their card they would place a bean over it. If a straight line is formed in any direction the winner would shout ‘beano!’.
Lowe went back to New York and introduced the game to his friends. The story goes that while playing, one of them mistakenly pronounced it as ‘bingo’, giving birth to the modern game. In 1930 Lowe hired mathematician Carl Leffler to create more variations in bingo cards, and he invented around 6,000 different combinations!
Lowe’s bingo game became incredibly popular and by the 1940s he was licensing it to game operators all over the country for $1 a year. It became a common way for churches and charities to raise money. In 1968 the modern bingo game was formalised in the United Kingdom, and in 1986 the famous National Bingo Game was launched. In more recent times Online Bingo has captured a huge share of the market and continues to go from strength to strength whilst the Bingo Halls fall further into decline.
