The game was called Beano because players used dried beans to mark their cards as the numbers came up.

Lowe observed a game called 'Beano' at a country carnival in Atlanta, Georgia.

Lowe, a struggling but enterprising toy salesman from New York. These lottery-type bingo games soon became a craze throughout Europe.īingo as we know it today was popularized by Edwin S. The first player to cover one whole row was the winner. The caller reached into a bag and picked out wooden chips marked 1 through 90 (1 to 10 for the first column, 11 to 20 for the second, and so forth). One version used a playing card with nine columns and three rows, with four free spaces per row.

(Interestingly, even to this day you can still play that lotto every Saturday.) The French picked up lotto in the late 1700s. That's when a state-run lottery called 'Lo Gioco del Lotto d'Italia' started in Italy. While bingo became popular in the United States early in the twentieth century, the roots of the game stretch back to the year 1530.

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