Archive for May, 2011
A culture of Bingo.
While there is little or no documentation to prove it, Bingo, in its earliest form, may have come from traditional Roman infantrymen whiling away their time while on garrison duty away from their houses. The game of Keno, a variation of Bingo, and a game I played when last in Vegas, is meant to have originated from Japanese Emperors and Shoguns. Again, tiny hard proof of this!
We then go back to Rome again, because Bingo’s history actually appears to have started in 1530 in Italy, with a Government bankrolled lottery game, called “Lo Guico del Lotto”. If you’re in Italy on a Saturday, you can see folk still playing the game, virtually five hundred years on!
Le Lotto was a type of the game similar to what we all know and love today, and commenced in France in the late 1700s. There is no evidence to suggest the French Royalty and aristocrats attempted to utilise the game to subvert the masses from their revolution, however it appears the game used playing cards, tokens and the card suits and numbers called out loud. Unlike revolution, the game spread quickly across Europe. There are examples of it being utilized in Germany, seemingly as a teaching aid. Actually this occurs even today in numerous nursery and junior schools. I even found a variation utilized in an IT Company, designed to try reducing the number of user-unfriendly technical expressions used by its workers when pitching for contracts. There, if all of your techy words were crossed off, you got a dressing down from the CE!
The Western european version of Lotto had a player’s card divided into nine vertical rows and three horizontal ones forming squares. The vertical rows were divided into 10′s.. First row containing four numbers between 1-10, the second 11-20, up to the final row, 81-90. There were 5 blank squares, and one “completed” square. The object was to be the first to complete one of the horizontal rows, from numbers drawn by chance. Sound familiar?
Very similar to our Roman squaddies of yore, the game was taken overseas by the Army- this time the British Army forging its empire overseas. As you’d guess the English Commonwealth git the Bingo bug, and it was preferred in Australia at the turn of the 20th century. It was known as Housey Housey, and on finishing the whole card one would yell “House!” ( as in full house ).
Most analysts agree that the first recorded game was in 1929 at a carnival near Atlanta. The game was called “Beano” because although it had cards that would look familiar to us Bingo players today, dried beans were used to mark off the numbers called. A Toy Salesman from Manhattan called Edwin Lowe observed the game at a carnival and right away saw the aptitude for business success. It is maintained that.