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Bingo is not a new game. It has been around for hundreds of years in various forms. The bingo game dates back to the sixteenth century in Italy where it began as a form of a national lottery game. It was called Lo Giucco del Lotto D'Italia, then, and was extremely popular with the population.
The game faced a lot of opposition from the Catholic Church which disapproved strongly of it. In spite of the Church's opposition the free online bingo game spread to France by the 1770s. From France, it spread throughout the European continent where it was as popular as it was in Italy. The Americans changed the game when it arrived in the United States. The caller had a cigar box which contained discs with numbers on them. They would pull the discs from the box, call out the number, and the players would use pinto beans to cover the appropriate numbers on their cards. When a player completed a pattern, he called out "Beano", which is what the casino game was called at the time.
Edwin Lowe, a toy salesman, watched the game one day and got the idea to further develop the game and rename it "bingo". He hired a mathematician to develop cards with different combinations of numbers. Without any computers or random number generator software, the mathematician developed over six thousand cards. Lowe marketed the game as "Bingo". Ironically, his best customers were parishes of the Catholic Church. The game was used as a fundraiser, a function it still fulfills today. |
