A History Of Bingo

• Author: Jon Jackson
• Filed under: Bingo
• Date: Apr 22,2010

Similar to many other games and pastimes, it’s not entirely certain what the origins of bingo actually are. Of course, we can trace back the extremely popular current game of online bingo back to the birth of the internet, and then subsequently its rise in popularity since about 1995 onwards.

It’s quite difficult to work out where the real life game actually came from, though, so this is a possible history of bingo that is non-controversial and is generally accepted as being true. We start in Italy in the 16th century, with a game called “Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia”, which was a type of lottery.

This Italian game became popular in other countries, too, and it was the French who developed the bingo game cards we’re familiar with in the game played today. The Germans actually took this development a bit further, as they used the game as a means of teaching people about numbers.

During the 1920s in America, a bingo game was popular in the travelling carnivals, which was known as “beano”. This derived its name from the fact the numbers were called through drawing different numbers of beans. This game is thought to have become known as bingo after someone shouted this word instead of the more usual “beano”, once they’d won.

Travelling back in time to 16th century England, it seems there was a similar game to the one being played in Italy; and there were known to be many illegal lottery-style gambling games being played by large groups of people in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The reason for these games’ illegality is that the state had its own form of a lottery game that it was promoting, which was used as a means of raising money outside of taxation. In the early 1990s, the UK brought this system back into place, with the founding of what is now the UK National Lottery.

The early 1900s game of housey housey is one that is an obvious ancestor to today’s bingo. An outside observer, however, may imagine that bingo appeared in Britain as late as the 1960s, which is the so-called “golden age” of bingo, prompted by various changes and amendments to the law which allowed the major bingo hall chains to flourish.

Which leads us to the form bingo most often takes now, the internet version. It may seem surprising to some that online bingo is such a popular pastime, but its combination of chance and the possibility of winning huge sums has led to its being played by millions of people around the world.

Jon Jackson is a bingo specialist, with many years experience of operating internet UK bingo websites.