BINGO FACTS AND BINGO HISTORY

The origins of Bingo can be traced back to the year 1530 in which a State run lottery game Lo Giuco de Lotto was originated. The game is still held every Saturday in Italy. "Le Lotto" migrated to France in the late 1700s in a form similar to the Bingo we know today, with a playing card, tokens and numbers read aloud.

Throughout the 1800's these lottery type of games spread quickly throughout Europe and many offshoots of the game were created. One popular form of game had a player's card divided into 3 horizontal rows and 9 vertical ones. The first vertical row contained the numbers from 1 to 10, the second from 11 to 20, and so on until 81-90 on the ninth vertical row. The 3 horizontal rows each contained five squares with numbers in them and 4 blank ones. The caller would then draw from a bag of wooden chips numbered from 1 to 90. The object of the game was to be the first to completely cover one of the 3 horizontal rows. The blank squares were considered free squares much like the free square in the Bingo cards of today.

In 1929, a game called "Beano" was played at a carnival near Atlanta, Georgia. The bingo game's tools consisted of dried beans, a rubber number stamp and some cardboard. A New York toy salesman named Edwin Lowe, observed the game where players exclaimed "BEANO!" if they filled a line of numbers on their card. Lowe introduced the game to his friends in New York where one of them mistakenly yelled "BINGO!" in her excitement . "Lowe's Bingo" was soon very popular and Lowe asked competitors to pay him $1 per year to allow them to call their games Bingo as well.

By the 1940's Bingo games had sprung up all over the country with thousands of games being played every week. Today Bingo games can be found just about anywhere.

Fun Bingo Facts

Edwin Lowe the originator of the game "Lowe's Bingo" sought the services of a math professor at Columbia University, Carl Leffler, to expand the amount of number combinations. In 1930, Professor Leffler devised 6,000 bingo cards with non-repeating number groups. It was said that he completed the task successfully, and then went insane.

In the 1800's a Lotto game similar to Bingo was used as an educational tool Germany designed to teach children multiplication tables.

There are 1,474,200 unique Bingo cards possible.


KENO FACTS AND HISTORY

According to an ancient scroll a man named Cheung Leung introduced the game we now call Keno over 2000 years ago in China. Cheung's city was at war for many years and supplies for his army were running out. The citizens of his city refused to give any more money to the war effort, so Cheung Leung created a game of chance to produce revenue to provision his army. The game was an instant success and the city was saved. The game spread throughout China and was used to help fund the building of the Great Wall. The game became known as the White Pigeon Game because carrier pigeons were used to send the results from the games in the big cities to the smaller villages.

When Keno first originated about 200 years B.C. in China, characters were used in the body of the ticket rather than numbers 1 through 80 we know today. These characters are the first eighty of an ancient poem known as " The Thousand Character Classic ".

The Thousand Character Classic was used in China as a primer for teaching reading and writing to children. By putting one thousand characters into a more or less coherent rhymed form, learning was presumably made easier and more interesting. It is something of a very great achievement in that no character is repeated. This poem was so well known in China that its one thousand characters, arranged in order, were often used as a way of notation or counting from one to a thousand.

The game which is similar to the keno played today was brought to the United States by Chinese immigrants who worked on the trans-continental railroad.

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