Millions of people enjoy playing bingo today, either at their neighborhood bingo halls or at online bingo sites. But have you ever wondered where the name "Bingo" came from in the first place?
It Started as Beano
Our story starts in the year 1929, at a country carnival near Jacksonville, Georgia, USA. A toy salesman from New York named Edwin S. Lowe happened to be driving by, and he stopped to see what was going on.
At one tent in the carnival, Lowe saw a large crowd of people gathered around a table full of numbered cards and beans. One man was pulling numbered disks from a cigar box and calling out the number on the disk. Whenever a player had that number on his card, he would place a bean on the number. Finally, when someone completed a line of five beans on his card, he would yell "Beano!" and win a Kewpie doll as a prize.
Lowe was amazed at the enthusiasm he saw for the Beano game. Long after the rest of the carnival had closed down for the day, the Beano crowd kept demanding more. Finally, at 3:00 a.m., the caller had to chase the players away in order to finally close.
Afterwards, the beano caller explained to Lowe that he had seen a similar game called Lotto played in Europe the previous year. He made some changes to the game, renamed it Beano, and brought it to country carnivals and county fairs throughout the southern United States.
"Bingo" and a "Strange Sense of Elation"
Ed Lowe returned to New York, bought some dried beans to be used as markers, and started running Beano games in his apartment. He found that his New York friends were just as enthusiastic about the new game as the folks down in Jacksonville had been. Then one night, a woman won the game. She jumped up and, in her excitement, became momentarily tongue-tied. Finally, instead of Beano, she blurted out "BINGO!"
"I cannot describe the strange sense of elation which that girl's cry brought to me," Lowe later recalled. "All I could think of was that I was going to come out with this game, and it was going to be called Bingo!"
Every Time You Play Bingo
The rest, of course, is history. Ed Lowe did indeed mass-market the game, and he did call it Bingo. Bingo's popularity skyrocketed throughout the United States, and then the rest of the world. Millions of people play
online bingo and land-based bingo every day. And now, every time you
play bingo, you will know when and how the name originated.
