Bingo History

The history of the game of Bingo as we recognise it today stretches back over many centuries. The game’s roots were embedded within the lottery games that have been played for millennia by ancient civilisations. Over the years Bingo has appeared under many guises, embodying a variety of purposes from commercial to charitable to educational. And yet, although the practice of the modern game as played in Bingo halls (and, to a greater degree, via online facilities) is a comparatively recent development, the basics of the game remain relatively unchanged since it inception.

Early Forms of Bingo

Gambling has been a part of human societies for millennia, and we know that lotteries, of which Bingo is an offshoot, have certainly been conducted since pre-Roman times.

The form of Bingo that we play today, however, can be traced directly back to Italy during the 1530s. In the city of Florence at this time a municipal lottery, which were not uncommon in 16th century Europe, had emerged called La Lotto de Firenze. This game, believed to be the first public lottery to award cash prizes, was already very similar to the 90-ball game that is popularly played in the UK today - featuring cards divided up into rows and columns featuring a random selection of numbers from 1 to 90 with players marking off numbers as they were drawn from a bag in order to complete their cards.

The La Lotto de Firenze evolved into a state-run lottery that still exists today in Italy. Known as Lo Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia (literally ‘The Clearance of The Lot of Italy’), it has weekly draws which provide large revenues for the Italian Government, although in practice the game itself now has more in common with the UK’s national lottery.

Bingo-like games spread steadily throughout Europe over the subsequent centuries – most notably in France, where they were enjoyed by the intelligentsia, and Germany where the games often appeared as an educational tool for teaching literacy, numeracy and multiplication to children, a practice still seen today. Some sources claim that it is during this time that the role of a number caller was introduced – an essential characteristic of modern Bingo.

Bingo in the New World – ‘Beano’

Though lotteries and Bingo-like games proliferated throughout Europe during the following era, the next major event in the game’s history occurred in the US towards the beginning of the 20th century. Apparently, the game had reached America via a carnival pitchman who, on a tour of Germany, had witnessed the excitement that the game caused at local fairs and immediately spotted its potential as a popular carnival attraction. Making some alterations in the way the game was played to allow a variety of winning combinations (this was the root of 75-ball variation more popularly played in the US and Canada) he returned home and ran the game at country carnivals.

It was at one of these carnivals towards the end of 1929, during the time of the devastating US stock market crash, that Edwin S. Lowe, a New York toy salesman, stopped while on a business trip to Jacksonville, Georgia. He noticed immediately that one of the carnival tents was packed with people playing a game called Beano. The rapt participants were huddled round a horseshoe-shaped table covering numbers on their cards with beans as they were bellowed out by the caller – upon completing a line of numbers on the card, either horizontally, vertically or diagonally, the winning player would shout ‘Beano!’ and receive a small doll as a prize.

When the game finally came to an end – much to the dismay of the punters – Lowe approached the pitchman and learned of his augmentation of the German game. After witnessing the huge popularity of the game and the compulsive reaction of the participants Lowe began to envision a mass market version of the game.

The Name ‘Bingo’

According to the traditional lore, the game’s modern moniker was conceived by accident during one of Lowe’s experimental early games. While researching his new concept, he had taken to inviting friends to his apartment and conducting games of Beano just as he had seen taking place at the carnival. It was during one of these games, his friends as enraptured as the Beano-playing carnival-goers, that on completion of a winning line, a woman yelled out ‘Bingo!’ Whether her mistake was due to excitement or some other reason, the word appealed to Lowe and he adopted the erroneous exclamation as the name for his mass-marketed version.

Lowe’s Bingo game, released as a one dollar 12-card set and two dollar 24-card set, was a huge success and made him and his company a great deal of money. However, since the game had emerged from the public domain, Lowe had no way of trade marking the name. To avoid litigation he asked his competitors to pay him one dollar a year and to name their imitation products Bingo, thus the name became universally used.

The Rise of Bingo in the US

Lowe’s mass-produced game, and its countless imitations, were enjoyed for many years by players of all ages across the US. The next major event in the game’s history occurred when Lowe was approached by a Pennsylvanian priest who had been using the game to raise money in his struggling parish. It seemed that although Lowe’s Bingo had proved to be a popular fundraising tool, the odds were too generously stacked towards the players – the limited number of cards producing a very high probability of winning each game.

Again, Lowe understood the inherent cash-raising potential of the game, but realised that a huge amount of extra cards would need to be created in order to reduce the odds of winning. Not an easy task considering that each card in the set must be unique, with an estimated 552,446,474,061,129,000,000,000,000 different combinations of numbers on a 75-ball card and, most significantly, computers a few decades away from being invented. Lowe, shrewd as always, realised this was beyond his talents. Thus he employed the services of Carl Leffler, an ageing mathematics professor at Columbia University. Leffler, paid on a card by card basis, created 6,000 Bingo cards for Lowe in a year. Sadly, according to the history books, the pressure of the task and increasing difficulty of generating each new card eventually drove the professor insane.

The introduction of the new cards was a success, increasing the popularity and proliferation of the game across North America. The priest who had originally approached Lowe managed to raise enough funds to save his church and others followed suit. Thus, the game proliferated throughout US churches as a fund-raising tool and is noted to have saved many failing parishes. This function of Bingo as a fund-raising tool is still widespread in the North America today; indeed it is probably the most common incarnation of Bingo in the US. In Britain over the following decades, however, the game took a much more commercial route.

Bingo in Britain

It was during the 1960s, due to a number of converging factors, that Bingo became popularised in Britain. The rise of television had taken its toll the nation’s abundant cinemas and dancehalls: with admissions declining heavily those that were not knocked down struggled to fill their auditoriums or were simply left empty.

At this time the influence of US culture on the UK was still growing, as it had been for some decades. A flood of cultural imports entered British society and following the influx of film, television, music and fashion across the Atlantic were social phenomena such as tenpin bowling and pool. Furthermore, the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act (and the subsequent 1968 Gaming Act) made it the possibility of commercial bingo halls a reality, as long as they were run as members-only clubs.

The first person to realise the opportunity Bingo presented for the UK’s faltering dancehalls and cinemas was Eric Morley, founder of Miss World, and director of Mecca at the time. He was an early champion of the game, housing it initially in the old cinema and dancehall buildings and steering the public image away from the game’s gambling aspects in order to focus more on its positive social aspects.

The success was dramatic and swift, within a few years Bingo had become one of the country’s most popular pastimes, with the game outgrowing its co-optation of the old cinemas to require custom-built Bingo halls that would remain in use for decades to come. A great deal of money was invested in the Bingo industry during the 60s and 70s. As a result unlike the Bingo in the UK was full of glitz and pizzazz, a night at the Bingo hall was an exciting prospect, instilling a sense of occasion for players. The consequence of this is that a clear distinction grew between the highly commercialised and glossy nature of UK Bingo and the less glamorous, charity-based US Bingo.

Bingo Now

Since the huge initial success of commercial Bingo in the UK during the 1960s the industry has grown steadily over the decades. Bingo halls, though not as popular as they once were, still enjoy huge membership numbers and respectable profits.

The most recent and important evolution of the game is, quite obviously, online bingo. The development of the internet and the staggering success of online gambling mean that a whole new generation of bingo players, as well as lifelong fans, now enjoy the game in a completely different way than previous generations.