Around 1530, when Italy was unified, the origin of bingo took place. The Italians created a national lottery called "Lo Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia," which is still played every Saturday in Italy. The French learned about this game in 1778 and adapted it for their own purposes, making slight modifications to the gameplay, including dividing the card into three horizontal lines and nine vertical lines. The vertical lines contained numbers from 1 to 10 in the first line, from 11 to 20 in the second line, and so on up to number 90. There were no identical cards.
By the year 1929, the popularity of bingo games had already crossed the ocean and reached Jacksonville in Georgia. It was there that a traveling salesman spoke of a game he had discovered in Germany the previous year. The Germans also had their own version of the game since 1800, but it was merely a children's game used to help them learn mathematics, words, and history. It was on a New York afternoon that the toy salesman, Edwin S. Lowe, introduced the game when all his booths were closed except for one. That day, that booth became packed with people eager to see the new game. The action revolved around a horseshoe-shaped table covered with numbered cards and dried beans. The game was being played as a variant of the original Italian lottery, and it was called Beano. The person in charge of drawing the numbers had several numbered discs from a tobacco box, while the players marked off the numbers as they were drawn, placing a dried bean on the corresponding number. When they completed a line, they exclaimed "Beano."
Lowe returned to his New York home and made the decision to kickstart this captivating new game, Bieno. His companions enjoyed playing the game with equal fervor and delight as experienced during Carnival games. In the midst of a game, a woman, brimming with excitement upon completing a line, accidentally exclaimed "Bingo" instead of "Bieno," thus giving birth to the name by which we know the game today.
The older versions of the game were quite amusing, but each time it was played, there were always four or five winners, which posed a certain problem. Lowe determined that more numbers were needed to reduce the chances of so many players winning, so he sought the assistance of a mathematics professor from Columbia University, whose name was Carl Leffler. Lowe's request entailed the professor creating 6,000 new bingo cards with repeated sets of numbers. The professor managed to accomplish this task, thus giving birth to Lowe's company with the 6,000 unique cards. It is said that Leffler went mad thereafter.
