Bingo History
Bingo has a long and rich history, dating all the way back to the 16th century.
The origins of bingo are thought to come from the Italian National Lottery – Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia – which was founded in 1530 with the unification of the Italian state. It is still running today.
A bingo style lottery spread to France and there is a 1778 press report saying that Le Lotto was one of the favoured pastimes of the intellectual classes. It was at this time that the classic bingo card format was established, with three horizontal rows and nine vertical rows with each horizontal row having five numbered squares and four blank ones. Each vertical row contained a range of ten numbers – for example, the first row would have the numbers 1 to 10 while the second row would have the numbers 11 to 20. No two cards in Le Lotto were identical. Players were given markers to cover their numbers as each one was drawn from a cloth bag. The winner would be the first person to cover all their numbers. It is in fact remarkable how little bingo has changed in more than 300 years.
Lotto’s popularity spread across Europe in the 19th century and in Germany education Lotto games were used to help pupils learn multiplication tables as well as improve spelling, learn history and identify animal species. These games are still widely sold in German toy shops, mainly aimed at the three to seven year old child.
Bingo came to America in the 1920s, thanks to a showman (whose name has been lost to history) who saw Lotto being played in Germany and took it back to the United States. He renamed the game ‘Beano’, believing that would be a more popular cry for the winning player who had covered all their numbers than ‘Lotto’.
The spread of bingo in America can however be attributed to a New York toy salesman, Edwin S Lowe, who in December 1929 came across Beano being played at a carnival near Jacksonville, Georgia.
It was late at night and he came across the carnival; it was closed with the exception of one booth, which was totally packed. What he found in the booth was players playing a variation of Lotto, with the booth owner pulling numbers out of a cigar box and players covering the numbers that had been called with beans (hence ‘Beano’). Whoever won received a small Kewpie doll (a special brand of doll popular as carnival prizes and now highly collectable).
Lowe recalled later: “I couldn’t get a seat. But while I was waiting around, I noticed that the players were practically addicted to the game. The picthman wanted to close up, but every time he said, “This is the last game’, nobody moved. When he finally closed at 3:00 a.m. he had to chase them out.”
Lowe got chatting to the operator and found that he had discovered it while traveling in Germany and that everywhere he had offered the game in America it had been a huge success.
The toy salesman returned to New York and decided to re-create the game for his friends at his apartment. One woman, who got increasingly nervous and excited as her numbers were called off, finally hit her final number and instead of shouting ‘Beano’ shouted ‘Bingo’.
Lowe knew instantly that he should rename the game. “I cannot describe the strange sense of elation which that girl’s cry brought to me,” he said many years later. “All I could think of was that I was going to come out with this game, and it was going to be called Bingo!”
Lowe initially launched his Bingo product in two formats – either with 12 cards for one dollar or 24 cards for two dollars. It was an almost instant success.
Lowe did not copyright either the concept (which probably would not have been protectable as it was already being played in carnivals) or the name (which would have been easy to protect) and soon plenty of rivals were copying the game. Lowe went to each of them and asked that they pay a royalty of a dollar a year and that they call their games Bingo too. As a result the name stuck and became a generic description of the new Lotto games sweeping America.
Bingo as a public game really took off when, only a few months after the game had hit the market, Lowe was approached by a priest from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. One of his parishioners had come up with a fund raising scheme to play bingo to raise money for the church and they had started doing so using several sets of the two dollar game Lowe was selling. However as there was a maximum of 24 cards per set, every game was producing several winners who all had the identical cards.
Could, the priest asked, Lowe produce several hundred cards, all with different numbers?
Lowe realised that if he could the game has enormous commercial possibilities. He approached Carl Leffler, an elderly professor of mathematics at Columbia University, who agreed to generate 6,000 different cards. The strain of producing the cards eventually led to Leffler’s mental collapse but only after he had delivered the 6,000 cards – for a fee of $100 – to Lowe.
The Pennsylvania church was saved from its financial crisis and soon word spread of what a fantastic fund raising game bingo was. “I used to get thousands of letters asking for help on setting up Bingo games,” Lowe later recalled and he was forced to write a Bingo Instruction Manual to answer all the queries; a monthly newsletter, The Blotter, followed and it soon had 37,000 subscribers.
By 1934, an estimated 10,000 bingo games were played weekly across America and Lowe’s company, with more than 1,000 employees and 64 printing presses, were running 24 hours a day to keep up with demand. Lowe claimed that their nine storey New York offices used more newsprint than the New York Times.
Lowe claims the largest bingo game ever held was at New York’s Teaneck Armory where 60,000 players competed to win 10 cards and more than 10,000 people were turned away from playing.
Bingo spread across the world and is widely played in Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, Mexico and Argentina, as well as the United States. It is estimated that 400 million euros ($360 million) per month is spent on charity bingo games across America, while in Europe as much as 5 billion euros is staked annually on bingo games.
Online bingo is the fastest developing sector of the bingo market, with several hundred online bingo sites building the market. The online bingo market was largely focussed on the United States until October 2006 when a change in American gaming legislation made it illegal for operators to process financial transactions from American players. The online bingo market is now dominated by the UK, where an estimated 100,000 players play online every week.
