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Bingo can be traced back
to a lottery game called "Lo Giuoco Code Loto"
played in Spain in 1530. By the eighteenth
century, the game had matured, and in France,
playing cards, tokens, the reading out of
numbers had been added to the game. In the
nineteenth century, Bingo was widely used in
Germany for educational purposes to teach
children spelling, animal names, and
multiplication tables.
At a travelling carnival
near Atlanta in 1929, Beano was being played
with dried beans, a rubber stamp and cardboard
sheets. Edwin Lowe, was watching this game and
noticed how engaged the players were. The
Carnival worker had to kick the players out at 3
am. Lowe, took the idea with him to New York
where he introduced the game to his friends. He
conducted bingo games similar to the ones he had
witnessed, using dried beans, a rubber numbering
stamp and card board. His friends loved the
game. It is said that one of his players made
bingo history when he was so excited to have won
that he yelled out “Bingo” instead of “Beano."
The Lowe Bingo Game had two versions; the first
a 12-card set for $1.00, the second a $2.00 set
with 24 cards. Bingo was a wild success. By the
1940s Bingo games were all over the country.
Lowe had many competitors and all he asked was
that they pay $1.00 a year to conduct the games
and of course to use the name Bingo.
FACT
In the 1930s, John Harrah, father of Harrah's
Casinos founder William Fisk Harrah, operated a
$100-a-week bingo hall in California. He sold
the business to his son, who moved it to Reno,
Nevada, and built it into a $50,000-a-year
operation. When the first Harrah's Casino
opened, it was known as "the house that bingo
built."
In the United States, commercial bingo is
considered a Class II game and is legal even in
most states that prohibit other forms of
gambling. The American version of the game uses
a field of seventy-five numbers, while European
versions use ninety numbers. Bingo is allowed
for charitable purposes in Ireland and is highly
regulated in Great Britain; it is the only form
of gambling allowed in the British military,
where it is known as "tombola," "house," or "housy-housy."
Truly high-stakes bingo really came into its own
in the 1970s on American Indian reservations.
Because tribes are recognized as governments,
the bingo numbers being called. In some cases,
usually at tribal casinos, the bingo hall may be
located in a different building from the casino.
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