It’s in the Cards

Bingo can drive you mad.  When Bingo inventor Edwin S Lowe approached elderly Columbia University professor Carl Leffler and asked him to create 6,000 bingo cards, with non repeating numbers, little did the mathematics professor realize the process would eventually drive him insane.

The current incarnations of online bingo and free bingo are now a multi-million pound industry, an industry that has its roots in a very humble beginning.

New York toy salesman Lowe discovered the game of Beano, in December, 1929, when he visited a country carnival, a few miles outside Jacksonville.  The carnival booths were all closed except for one which was packed with people.  The action centred around a horseshoe shaped table covered with numbered cards and beans.

As the caller – or pitchman – pulled the numbers from an old cigar box, the eager players would use the beans to cover the numbers on their cards.  When a line of numbers was completed- either diagonally, horizontally, or vertically, the winning player would shout ‘beano’.

Lowe was hooked. He took the game back to New York and invited his friends to play.  His friends loved the experience and – in the excitement – one of the winners shouted out ‘bingo’ instead of ‘beano’  The modern game was born.

Leffler gets involved several months later when a flaw in the original game is uncovered.

A priest, from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania - acting on the advice of a canny parishioner – had decided to try and use bingo as a way of raising money to get the church out of financial difficulties. He had bought several sets of Lowe’s game but had stumbled across a problem.

The games only had a certain number of cards and the church bingo nights always resulted in multiple winners.  Would it be possible for Lowe to make more cards?

Lowe approached Leffler who agreed to create cards with a fee for each individual card.  With each additional card, the task became increasingly difficult. Eventually, Leffler was charging Lowe $100 for every card.

When the task was completed, Lowe had 6,000 completely different cards and the professor had gone insane.

The game took off. By 1934, it is estimated that there were an average of 10,000 games every week. Ed Lowe''s firm had a thousand employees frantically trying to keep up with demand. Nine entire floors of New York office space,, filled with 64 presses, printing 245 hours a day, kept bingo players happy across the US.

According to Lowe, the largest Bingo game in history was played in New York''s Teaneck Armoury with 60,000 players. Ten automobiles were given away and Bingo had arrived.  Winning prizes in bingo remains one of the most popular aspects of the game and keeps the games exciting for the players.