What was bingo history like in the USA? In December 1929, Edwin S. Lowe, a New York toy salesman struggling to make a living, took it upon himself to travel to a small Georgia town known as Jacksonville.
A few miles from the city, he came across a village carnival. Even though it was late at night, one of the carnival booths was still open and packed with people. Inside, the participants played a variation of the lotto, which they called "Beano". It followed the same idea as the version played by the French Socialists, but the players here used a bean to cover the called number on their card. The moment someone filled in the line on their card, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, they won and shouted "BIANO"!
Upon his return to New York, Low bought some dried beans and a rubber stamp to print on cardboard. Then, he invited his friends to try the game and watched them play with the same passion as those he saw at the carnival. Everything was fun and funny, and during one of the rounds, the participant was so happy about her triumph that she jumped and misspelled the word: instead of Biano, she shouted "Bingo"!
This prompted Lowe to turn the Beano game into Bingo and launch it as a product. The earliest of these games were released in two separate variants, one with twelve-dollar cards and the other with twenty-four two-dollar cards. Thus, the game turned into a real hit and we got the game that we know today as bingo.
