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Bingo History
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.It originated as a "lottery" game called, "Lo Giuco de Lotto".A couple of hundred years later, this type of lottery migrated over to France in the 1700s, it took the form of the bingo we all know and love today.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.
When the game reached North America in 1929, it became known as "beano". 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". He hired a Columbia University math professor, Carl Leffler, to help him increase the number of combinations in bingo cards. By 1930, Leffler had invented 6,000 different bingo cards.
A Catholic priest from Pennsylvania approached Lowe about using bingo as a means of raising church funds. When bingo started being played in churches it became increasingly popular. By 1934, an estimated 10,000 bingo games were played weekly, and today more than $90 million dollars are spent on bingo each week in North America alone.
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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