How the game of Bingo! Came about.
The white heat of the intense competition is on you. Armed with your felt tip pen you are ready to make you mark. If you’re a pro then it’s likely you have a dabber ready so that you can put that impression straight on your card. No wasting time as those precious seconds can be all the difference between a major victory (in the shape of a lovely leg of lamb), a minor prize (like a chocolate orange) or nothing at all. A slight sweat starts to break out on your brow you just need 2 numbers to come out of the machine. “On its own, number 1”, says the announcer. Yes! That’s one you needed now it’s just 5 and 9 the Brighton Line and you’re there. You get to wave your card in the air and shout “House!” as loud as you can. Yes we’re playing bingo and it is good! It’s just one of the things you could be doing in the wonderful community that they have in Gloucestershire Park Homes. Why not have a look at http://www.parkhomelife.com/park_pineview.aspx and then we see how this surprisingly exciting game.
Bingo comes from Italy. A version was being played in 1530 with the start of the “Lo Giuoco del Lotto D’Italia”. It still gets played every Saturday to this day over there and is the oldest in the world. The random drawing of numbers out of a bag or machine in modern times is pretty much the crux of it after all and it’s a lottery as to what comes out. Somewhere around the end of the seventeen hundreds some very rich French people decide they liked the game very much after a quick holiday over the border and took it home to France. They then began playing “Le Lotto”, and it was so popular that some German friends thought they might like a go. In typical Teutonic thoroughness the Germans removed the gambling element and used it as a child’s education tool instead. As ever it was the North Americans who really took the concept and ran with it. At county fairs a “beano booth” operator would draw numbers out of box and shout them out. Players would place dried beans over their number cards and scream “beano!” when they have filled it.
This was the start of the game we know today and the only reason it is called bingo is because someone called out beano wrong and the man who commercially developed it liked that better. As a side note he also invented Yahtzee.
