Bingo Cards Throughout History by Joe Lee

 

Bingo cards have undergone some pretty dramatic changes in the past few decades, but more so with the advent of online bingo. When you look back at the history of the game of bingo, when it became a popular game in county fairs in the US, it was first known as Beano. This was because the Beano cards had to be reused for every game and by covering a number with a bean, the card had a far longer lifespan. You will probably remember as a child, I know I do, in every compendium of games; you would get a bingo game; in the game were reusable cards and little cardboard disks or plastic counters that were used to cover the numbers so the card could played again. So it was something like this only beans did the job.

After the discovery of the beano game by a man named Edwin S Lowe, who believe it would enjoy great commercial success. He commissioned a Mathematics Professor to come up with a system of numbers that would allow different combinations on the card to recreate a variety of 6 000 cards. This is also when it is said the name of the game changed from Beano to Bingo. Edwin Lowe introduced the game to a group of friends to see if they would like it, and one winner became so excited when they realized that they had covered all the numbers on their card that they jumped up and mistakenly shouted “Bingo”. Edwin Lowe liked this so much that according to legend, he changed the name of the game to “Bingo”. Anyway, I digress, the cards at this stage had evolved and now 6 000 different cards became available, allowing the game to be more exciting, more unpredictable as well as more disposable.

When the game was introduced to the UK, there were lean years ahead and bingo cards still had to be re-used but eventually the disposable era arrived and bingo cards were purchased, marked using a dabber and then disposed of. This system is still in use in some bingo clubs today.

However with the advent of technology, shutter board came about, these were bingo cards that had shutters, you just closed the shutter on the number that was called in order to mark your card. Then electronics were introduced and online bingo, so now, we don’t even have to mark our own cards, the computer does it for us, heck we don’t even have to use paper, so essentially online bingo is a “green product”.

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About the Author

To learn more about Bingo and to know its nuances in order to enhance your business, we recommend you to read the articles written by Joe Lee who has written lots of Bingo articles. She is a full time "Bingo" articles writer.