In the United States, bingo was originally called “beano”. No, it wasn’t a racial epithet, even though many aged Americans may also use it thusly. No, it was a game played at fairs where a dealer would select numbered discs from a cigar box and players would mark their cards with, wait for it, beans.
When they won, they’d holler out, “beano!” and claim their prize. Perhaps a jar of yams or a nice single wool sock, I don’t know what they gave out at fairs back then, but some speculate it was mostly polio.
So does the game really go back as far as your Nana, who spends every Wednesday night in the basement of the church daubing away at squares? Well, yes and no. Depending how old your grandma is, it might go back even further.
The history of Bingo goes back to 1530, to an Italian lottery called “Lo Giuoco del Lotto D’Italia,” which is still played Saturdays in some parts of Italy.
Once it left Italy, Bingo was introduced to France some time in the late 1770s, where it was called “Le Lotto”, or as it translates to English, “The Lotto”.
While it was a game played among wealthy Frenchmen, Germans also played a version in the 1800s. They played Bingo as a child’s game to help students learn math, spelling and… did you guess history? Bingo!
When Bingo reached the Americas in 1929, it became known as “beano”, and not because they used to eat a nacho dip of beans and cheez-whiz. Also the name “bean-yes” was already taken.
It is believed that it was first played at a carnival near Atlanta, Georgia. New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe renamed it “bingo” after he overheard someone accidentally yell “bingo” instead of “beano”, proving that stupidity really is the mother of invention, or at least the entire premise of marketing.
Lowe hired Columbia University math professor Carl Leffler to help him increase the number of combinations in bingo cards, making winning more random. By 1930, Leffler had invented 6,000 different bingo cards.
Some say that Leffler then went insane, later in life, but others say that everyone playing the game suffers at least an ounce of it. This is what some call the Leffler Curse, while others call it the Leffler Blessing.
A Catholic priest from Pennsylvania approached Lowe about using bingo as a church fundraiser, which I’m guessing is where your grandma comes in. Once bingo started being played in churches its popularity went through the roof, which would technically mean it went into the pulpit.
By 1934, an estimated 10,000 bingo games were played weekly, roughly half of them were by your grandmother and her friends.
Today more than $90 million dollars are spent on bingo each week in North America alone, but that’s just the old way of playing it, and technology has caused a tidal shift in the game.
New iterations of Bingo are played online, or even more commonly, on sites where you can play on sites where you can find information to play mobile bingo, which attracts users with the ease and convenience of playing, while still retaining all the fun of the original game.
In the future, Bingo will not be played by humans, but rather by aliens visiting earth, and the prizes will be humans. What a crazy world we live in.