When enjoying your favourite game of online bingo have you ever wondered how such a phenomenon ever came to be? Well the earliest chronicles of bingo can be followed back to Italy asearly as 1530 where it was played as a lotto styled game, arriving in France around 1778. The modern version which is both familiar and popular today is believed to originate back to1929 in the form of a carnival game in what was then labelled ‘Beano’.
The name ‘Beano’ was chosen since players marked their cards with pinto or lima beans.
A travelling toy sales man named Edwin Lowe, happened across the game at a busy carnival in Jacksonville, Illinois, USA, and was inspired by the entertainment it provided and the keen interest surrounding it. He witnessed players attempting to form basic horizontally, vertically or diagonally covered lines of numbers on cards from numbers drawn from a cigar box, to win the grand prize – a doll.
Returning home after his business excursion, Lowe spontaneously set up an improvised game of Beano and called a number of his friends over to give it a go. The story is that one of his female visitors became very excited and animated during the game and called ‘Bingo’ rather than beano when she won, and so ‘Bingo’ was born. With the assistance of a mathematician friend, instead of the original 900 different variations of bingo cards, Lowe was able to generate a greater number of unique and randomised cards, 6000 in total, which would guarantee just one single winner per game.
Since then the game of bingo which we recognise today has spread to all four corners of the globe and has been used as a form of popular entertainment and to raise money for various charities. Bingo has gone from strength to strength and after a short lull during the eighties and nineties during which the game was modernised, has experienced a massive boom in popularity. It has established itself as a frontrunner in the lucrative online gambling market with the number of online bingo halls growing rapidly.
