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History
Of Bingo
Bingo is a relatively new game, descendent from lotteries
of old. Lotteries were first organized and used collectively
by the Italian government in the 1530's. Bingo's history stems
from a French lotto lover who developed an alternative version
of the lotteries that existed at the time. The initial alteration
had three horizontal rows and nine vertical rows with numbered
and blank squares in random arrangements. The columns were
broken into sets of 10 numbers,
1-10, 11-20, all the way up to 90 in the last column. The
bingo balls were chips in those days, and pulled out of a
sac by the caller. The first player to cover a horizontal
row was declared the winner.
In the 1800's Bingo variations
began to be used as teaching devices. Germany used a version
intended to teach its youth multiplication tables. Other educational
lotto games existed for spelling, history, biology, you name
it! This trend has never died, a quick walk through your local
toys-r-us will most likely reveal a Milton Bradley variation
of the game with Sesame Street characters, intended to teach
numbers and counting.
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Up until this
point though, bingo was not bingo, it was still known
as a lotto game or variation. The coining of the term
bingo is most often attributed to a slip of the tongue,
in the excitement of yelling 'Beano'! Beano was the name
of a carnival game traveling around New York state around
the same time that Edwin S. Lowe was searching for a game
to rescue his struggling toy company venture. |
Lowe tells the story of going
back to New York and gathering up beans, rubber stamps and
cardboard cards to hold his own beano get-together with friends.
As a sort of test Lowe acted as the caller, and it wasn't
long before he realized the addictive qualities of the game.
In one of these initial games, a friend of lowe's was fast
approaching a winning card as Lowe watched with facination.
As the woman approached the win she became more and more exciting,
more tense, and finally when she won she jumped up and tried
to stammer out 'beano!' but it came out garbled as 'bingo!'.
Lowe describes the moment as
momentous (yes, that's how I'm describing that), and recalls
knowing at that point in time he would be marketing the game
as Bingo!
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One story always mentioned
when discussing the history of bingo is about the one man
who went insane over the game (yes, a million women have followed
suit). The tale goes as so: Lowe was approached a couple of
years after the release of Bingo by a parishioner who had
adopted the game as a church fundraiser. The parishioner had
come across the problem of cards with the same number combinations,
in which there were multiple winners on the same game. To
circumvent this Lowe approached a preeminent mathematician
of the time, Carl Leffler of Columbia University. Leffler
took on the task of creating 6000 unique Bingo cards, slowly
working them out one card at a time. Being paid on a cards
produced basis, Leffler found the more he made the harder
his job was, and near the end was charging $100 for each unique
card produced. As the story goes, soon after completing the
task of creating all 6000 cards, the professor went insane,
perhaps by direct result! The rest, as they say, is bingo
history.
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