A Quick History of Bingo

 The game of bingo has quite an interesting history. Read on for more.

Bingo is actually a form of lottery with a history dating back to 16th century Italy. The Italian National Lottery, Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia, was organized in 1530, and it has been held each week since with almost no interruptions.

In 1929 a toy salesman named Edwin S. Lowe stumbled upon a country carnival, and it was at this carnival that he discovered a very popular game called beano. Beano was a variation of lotto in which the caller would pull small wooden disks from a cigar box and call out the number on the disk. Any player who had the corresponding number would place a bean on the number on the playing card. The first player to fill a line of numbers, whether horizontally, diagonally, or vertically, would yell “beano!” and win a prize.

What impressed Mr. Lowe about beano was its extraordinary popularity. After all of the other carnival booths had closed, the beano booth stayed open into the wee hours of the morning. People literally waited for an opportunity to play, but these opportunities were very rare. When the booth’s owner had had enough, he actually had to chase people away so that he could finally close his booth.

Beano’s popularity inspired Lowe to run his own beano games, and his games soon were as popular as the games he had watched at the carnival.

The story of how bingo got its name involves a woman who was playing at one of Lowe’s early beano games. She supposedly was so excited at winning that she jumped up and stuttered “B-b-bingo!” instead of beano.

There were 2 versions of Lowe’s first bingo game. One was a 12 card set which cost a dollar. The other was a 24 card set that cost 2 dollars. The games were instantly successful, and Lowe’s company was off and running.

Months later, a priest from a church in Pennsylvania approached Lowe with a problem. The priest’s church had bought several of Lowe’s 2 dollar games and was using bingo to overcome its financial woes. The problem was that each game produced over a half dozen winners. Lowe realized bingo’s fundraising potential, but he had to have many more combinations of numbers for his game to work on a large scale.

Lowe’s solution was to hire Carl Leffler, a math professor at Columbia University, to devise 6,000 new bingo cards with number groups which did not repeat. Leffler was able to do so, and by 1934 Lowe’s company was operating 24 hours a day to keep up with the immense demand for bingo.

The next time you sit down to play bingo, you might give a tip of the hat to Ed Lowe and Carl Leffler.