From Beano to Bingo: How the Game Started Out
It is highly unlikely that there are people today who do not know how to play bingo, or do not even know what the game is. It is a fact that the game is now a household name.
However, few know that the game of bingo actually started in Italy in the 1300s. The Italian government, upon the country's reunification, created a state lottery that is still being played today, and that lottery was called Lo Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia.
The game became so popular in Italy that soon word spread to France, and the French nobility soon started to play the game themselves. They called the game Le Lotto, and used playing cards divided into rows that contained numbers. A caller would draw out a numbered wooden chip from a cloth bag and call the number out. The players would then mark or cover the numbers on the their card. The first person to create a complete horizontal row on his card won.
The game came to America as Beano, and was played in a carnival in Jacksonville, Georgia. A traveling salesman named Edmund Lowe happened to come by this carnival one night and saw the excitement that the game generated from its players. The game consisted of a couple of numbered cards in rows and columns. Players gathered around a caller who would draw out numbered chips from a box. The players would then mark the numbers on their cards with beans. Those who created a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line with the numbers won.
Upon arriving in New York, his hometown, he quickly created a beano set of his own and started to play the game with friends. The game became popularly known as bingo, when a female friend mistakenly shouted out the word instead of shouting out beano. Lowe then decided to market the game and began selling bingo cards that he created for one or two dollars.
Not long afterwards he was approached by a parish priest from Pennsylvania, who complained that their bingo games at church often turned out a dozen or so winners, which was not a good thing since they were using the game as a fund raising gimmick. TO solve this Lowe enlisted the services of a Columbia University professor named Carl Leffler, who agreed to create cards with non-repeating number combinations for a fee. HE was able to create 6000 cards afterwards, but it is widely reported that he went insane after done so.
To this day bingo remains one of the most widely played games there is, and people play it online and offline. Edmund Lowe's company turned out hundreds of bingo cards and chips and they continued to do so for years, all to satisfy the world's newly-found interest in the game he helped create.