History of Bingo

Bingo in Italy

When Italy was unified in 1530, a weekly lottery was launched and held virtually every Saturday since its inception. By 1778 word of the game had spread to France and captured the fancy of the the upper class. During this period the popular version of the lottery was born where cards were divided into three horizontal rows and nine vertical columns.

Horizontal rows had five numbered and four blank squares in random arrangement, while vertical rows were numbered from 1 to 10 in the first row, 11 to 20 in the second row, et cetera, up to 90. No two Lotto cards were alike.

Chips numbered from 1 to 90 completed the playing equipment. Players were dealt a single Lotto card, then the caller would draw a small wooden, numbered token from a cloth bag and read the number aloud. The players would cover the number if it appeared on their card. The first player to cover a horizontal row wins.

The lottery made its way to America via a carnival pitchman touring Germany. There he came across the lottery game and recognized its appeal as a carnival tent game. He made a few changes to the game, including allowing players to complete a row vertically, horizontally or diagonally. And he changed the name to Beano.

He was working at the carnival one night in 1929 near Atlanta when a traveling toy salesman, Edwin S. Lowe, came by. Early for a sales call, Lowe decided to stop at the carnival. The only tent open was the Beano tent, which was so crowded with people that Lowe wasn't able to play the game for himself. Lowe watched how excited the crowd was.

Lowe immediately realized the money-making potential for Beano. Upon his return to his home in New York, he created his own Beano game by procuring some beans, cardboard and a rubber number stamp. He invited friends to his apartment to play the game. There he saw the same excitement he encountered at the carnival. During the game, one player had accidentally yelled out "Bingo!" and the name stuck.

It was a priest from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania who began to promote playing bingo in churches. One of the parishioners in his financially ailing church came up with the idea of using Bingo as a way to raise money for the church. But with only 24 unique cards to play with, the priest was finding that there were too many winners for each game.

The priest contacted Lowe about producing a large number of unique number combinations for the cards. Lowe enlisted the help of a professor of mathematics at Columbia University named Carl Leffler. The increased number of bingo cards was exactly what was needed to make the game a staple at churches across the country and a sound source of fund raising.

Where is Bingo Played?

Bingo is played in social halls, clubs and in amusement parks. Bingo continues to grow as a fund raiser for many types of societies such as firemen’s associations, schools, and even as fund raising for critically ill patients. The rules and the complexity of the game do change a bit from bingo hall to bingo hall but the overall concept of the game and the rules remain the same.

Bingo is played both online and offline. Offline, bingo players mark hard card or paper cards as the caller yells out the ball numbers. When the bingo player creates the pattern that is required at a certain time, the bingo player yells out “Bingo!” and receives a monetary prize. Sometimes other prizes are given in lieu of cash such as baskets, pottery, cooking supplies, cars, houses, computers and just about anything that can be given away in such a lottery!

Online bingo is similar to the offline game, but you use your mouse to mark the spots on the card and the computer uses a program called random number generator to tell you what the next number is.

A bingo card usually have 24 numbered spaces with one free space in the middle. There are a few bingo cards out there where the middle space is not free, but does include a number. Across the top of the bingo card are the letters B-I-N-G-O and the balls that are called out will correspond to these letters and the numbers possible on the card at any given instance.

Although a complete series of 6,000 combinations where brought about and created in the 1930s, today there is a series of 9,000 combinations possible on some types of bingo cards.

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