Bingo’s history is short but full. The game reached North America right around the great depression era, 1929.
The game was played with discs that were pulled from a cigar box. The discs had numbers on them and players marked their cards with dried beans. This is the reason the game was originally entitled “beano.”
However one day a business man by the name of Edwin S. Lowe overheard a beano player yell out “bingo” instead of bingo. Clearly an accident, for whatever reason, but Lowe took it upon himself to rename and distribute the game as such.
After realizing the vast opportunities for using bingo as a fundraising tool, Lowe hired a math professor by the name of Carl Leffler to increase the number of combinations in bingo cards. He did this because he was approached by a man who wanted to use bingo as a fundraiser at his church, but every time the game was played there were more than one winner.
Leffler then went on to produce more than 6000 different combinations of bingo cards. Afterwards, it is rumored although not known to be true, that he went insane.
Fundraisers became ever more popular and bingo was played at more and more. Eventually it was played at churches as fundraisers and in doing so became even more popular. In 1934 it was estimated that more than 10,000 games of bingo were played weekly.
Nowadays, over 90 million dollar each week are spent on bingo in just North America.
The game of bingo dates as far back as 1530 in Italy. The game was called “Lo Giuoco del Lotto D’Italia” From there it was introduced to France under the name “Le Lotto” and was played mostly among nobleman or wealthy Frenchman.
Eventually it moved its way into Germany where it gained popularity as a measure to help teach math, history, and spelling to children.
Bingo perhaps dates back even further but there aren’t records to prove such allegations. The game, however, is wildly popular today and continues to gain notoriety through the generations.
Bingo, it seems, is a game that will never die.
