The History of Bingo - Britain's Most Favourite Game
By: TOM GOULDIN

Even though bingo may be new to many people through their online playing experiences, the game is not a new game. Bingo can trace its heritage back to the fifteen hundreds and the Lo Giucco del Lotto D’Italia. This was the Italian national lottery game and once it began it was extremely popular with the population.

The gambling game was, however, not popular with the Catholic Church, who associated the game with the devil and evil. In spite of their warnings and threats, the game continued to spread throughout the European continent where it was intensely popular with the population. It reached France by the 1770s and from there made the journey to America.

When the game reached America, it was eagerly embraced by the population. The game was played on slips of papers with numbers written on them. These functioned as cards or tickets. They didn’t have bingo machines then so the numbers were written on discs and drawn from a cigar box. They also didn’t have plastic bingo chips so they used pinto beans to cover the numbers when they were called. This gave the game the name of Beano and when a player completed a line, the player would call out Beano.

One day a toy salesman named Edwin Lowe came across a crowd gathered on the side of the road he was driving on. He stopped to see what the gathering was about and found they were playing the game of Beano. He noticed the intense interest the players had in the game. They couldn’t break up the game because the players wanted to keep playing. This interested Lowe who is credited with being the inventor of the American game of bingo. Lowe hired a mathematician to develop unique cards based on twenty-four out of seventy-five numbers. They developed six thousand unique cards that were on a five number by five number grid with the letters of the word bingo across the top. He named the game Bingo and the game became very popular for use as a fundraiser by Catholic Church parishes and other churches during the Great Depression of the 1920s. The game developed differently in the United Kingdom where the game is based on ninety numbers and played on tickets that have three rows and nine columns.

In the 1990s, the game software was developed for use on the internet that made online bingo possible and today bingo is one of the most popular games on the internet.

For more information on playing bingo online, check out Unluckyforsome.co.uk, they list the top online bingo sites, including news, reviews and free bingo bonus offers.

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