An Italian lottery started it all

When Italy was unified in 1530, the lottery known as Lo Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia was born. This weekly lottery has been held virtually every Saturday since its inception. By 1778 word of this game had spread to France and captured the fancy of the intelligentsia. It was during this period that the popular version of the lottery was born.

Cards were divided into three horizontal rows and nine vertical columns. Each horizontal row contained a total of nine squares - five with numbers and four blank squares - arranged randomly in the row. The vertical columns contained ten numbers each: column one contained the numbers 1 - 10, column two contained 11 - 20, column three contained 21 - 30 and so on until the ninth column, which contained the numbers 81 - 90. Wooden chips with the numbers 1 - 90 were placed in a bag and drawn out one at a time. Each player had a unique lotto card and if the number called was on their card they marked it off. The first person to completely cover a horizontal row was the winner.

In the 1800s the popularity of lottery games spread throughout Europe. Education variations were created to aid children in learning their multiplication tables, spelling and even history.

What started as the Italian lottery made its way to America via a carnival pitchman touring Germany. There he came across a lottery game and recognized its potential appeal as a carnival tent game. He made a few revisions to the game play, including allowing players to complete a row vertically, horizontally or diagonally in order to win. And he changed the name to Beano.

He was plying his trade one December evening in 1929 at a carnival near Atlanta, Georgia, when a traveling toy salesman, Edwin S. Lowe, happened along. Early for a sales call, Lowe decided to stop at the carnival. The only tent open was the Beano tent, which was so crowded with people that Lowe wasn't able to play the game for himself.

Lowe watched as the players eagerly listened for the next number to be called and, if they had the number on their card, covered it with a bean. The excitement and tension in the crowd was palpable. When a player finally had a row covered, they yelled out "Beano!" Lowe watched in astonishment as the pitchman tried several times to close his tent, only to have the players insist he continue. It wasn't until 3:00 am that the games ended, and even then the pitchman had to chase the players away.

Lowe immediately realized the mass market potential for Beano. Upon his return to his home in New York, he created his own Beano game by procuring some beans, cardboard and a rubber number stamp. He invited friends to his apartment to play the game. There he saw the same rapt attention and excitement that he had witnessed at the carnival. One player in particular was growing ever more excited as the beans piled up on her card. When she finally had a complete row, in her rush to yell out the required "Beano," she became tongue tied and instead stammered, "B-b-bingo!"

"I cannot describe the strange sense of elation which that girl's cry brought to me," Lowe said. "All I could think of was that I was going to come out with this game, and it was going to be called Bingo!"

Lowe's earliest Bingo games came in two varieties: a 12-card set that cost a dollar and a 24-card set that cost two dollars. Although the name "Bingo" could have been trademarked, the game itself, having come out of the public domain, had no chance of being protected. Once the success of Lowe's game was evident, imitators came out of the woodwork. Lowe's only request to his competitors was for them to pay him a dollar a year to call their games "Bingo." Thus the name became generic for the game.

It was a priest from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and his financially ailing church that fused the game with churches across the country. A parishioner had come up with the idea of using Bingo as a way to raise money for the church. But with only 24 unique cards to play with, the priest was finding that there were half a dozen winners for every game. The priest contacted Lowe about producing a large number of unique number combinations for the cards. Lowe recognized the fund-raising potential of the game and enlisted the help of a professor of mathematics at Columbia University named Carl Leffler.

Leffler was charged with the task of producing 6,000 new bingo cards. He requested that he be paid on a per card basis. The more cards he created, the more difficult it was to come up with unique combinations. Toward the end he was being paid $100 per card. When the task was finally complete, it is said that the professor went insane!

But the increased number of bingo cards was exactly what was needed to make the game a staple at churches across the country and a sound source of fund-raising.

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