Bingo History

Here you can read more about the history of bingo.

Origins

The history of the game bingo can be traced back to an Italian Lottery played as early as 1530, called Lo Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia. Today, this lottery is still played every Saturday in Italy, so it has been around from almost 500 years! In the 1770s the game branched out to France. Here is was called Le Lotto and it was only played among the wealthy.

Beano and Bingo

Bingo also came to Germany, where it became a fairground game. It was mostly played by children, and the idea was that it would help them learn to count and recognise written numbers. Players had cards with numbers on them, and the host had a box of wooden discs with numbers engraved on them. When a number was drawn, players would mark that number on their card with beans. An American toy manufacturer, Edward Lowe, saw this game draw a big audience at a German fair, and decided to bring it to America. He let his friends play it to see how they liked it. If a player's card was fully marked with beans the player should say "Beano!", but one of Lowe's friends got carried away by all the excitement and leapt up yelling "Bingo!" instead. The story has it that this is how Beano became Bingo.

High Odds for Lowe

Bingo became very popular, and a lot of competitors wanted to offer Lowe's Bingo as well. Lowe charged them $1 a year to host bingo games. However, a priest from Pennsylvania, who was trying to use bingo games to raise money for the church, contacted Lowe about a problem that caused some hickups for his charity bingo event: the game often had too many winners because the cards were not unique enough. To solve this problem Lowe asked the mathematician Carl Leffler for help. Leffler reduced the odds of multiple winners by developing 6000 unique bingo cards. Bingo legend has it that the effort was too much, and that Leffler went insane shortly after completing this project.