Happy Birthday Bingo or Should That Be Beano?

80 years ago, a travelling salesman named Edwin S. Lowe, settled down to play a game of ‘Beano’ at a local fair in New York. Beano, was a popular game at country fairs, the rules of the game were simple : a dealer (similar to a card dealer) would select numbered discs from a box and players would mark their cards with beans and sometimes corn, hence the name ‘Beano’. But this time, the player who won the game, in his excitement, yelled, ‘Bingo‘ instead of ‘Beano’ which was overheard by Mr Edwin S. Lowe and thus the idea to rename the game to ‘Bingo’ was borne!

Mr Edwin S. Lowe was so determined to make his version of the ‘beano’ game even more popular he hired the services of a Mathematician, named Carl Leffler, to increase the number of combinations on his newly named ‘bingo cards’.

4 years later and Mr Edwin S. Lowe’s game of Bingo was so popular that it had spread over the full of North America. The game of beano quietly filtered into the background. Nowadays, Bingo is a worldwide phenomenon, that we all know and love. Happy Birthday Bingo!