History of Bingo

The modern game of Bingo started its history in Italy sometime during the 1500s. Back then it was a lottery game that was played every Saturday, and this is a tradition that has been kept till the present. The game was so popular that it started spreading to neighboring countries in the following centuries becoming extremely popular with wealthy Frenchmen towards the final decades of the 18th century. Here it was simply called “Le Lotto” and it involved the use of wooden numbered discs which would later morph into the bingo balls of today.

The game’s popularity continued to spread reaching Germany in the following century where the game transformed into a teaching aid for children to learn mathematics and became a very effective and fun way of teaching them multiplication tables.

The game slowly started making its way into English speaking countries, where it entered the mainstream due to the actions of a toy salesman who lived and worked in New York. He came across a game being played at a carnival somewhere near Atlanta, Georgia, a game that was called “Beano”, which was pretty much the same game we play today except for the fact that each player had a handful of dried beans which they would use to mark the numbers that we’re called out. The first player who’d get a straight line of beans would call out “beano” and became the winner of the game.

This toy salesman, seeing the excitement surrounding the game introduced it to his friends in New York who were likewise captivated and during a game a female player was so excited by winning that she called out “bingo” instead of “beano”, and this is how the modern game got its name.

Lowe, because that was the name of the toy salesman, soon realized that if the game was going to be played by more people then the number of combinations on the cards had to increase so he enlisted the aid of a University Maths professor named Carl Leffler and by the 1930s there were six thousand combinations created. The game of Bingo has swept the United States ever since and spread to all parts of the globe in one form or another.

It seems only natural that with the popularity of the game and that of the Internet, the game of Bingo would migrate into the online world where enthusiasts can play without leaving the comfort of their home.