It is tempting to think that online bingo is a relatively new invention. The digital age only really kicked into gear in the mid to late 1990s and it took a little while longer for bingo to make the transition from the pubs, clubs and bingo halls where it gained undeniable popularity throughout the latter half of the 20th century, onto the new electronic format (to get ibc accounts, go here).

Since then however, the game has taken the online world by storm. In the UK, online bingo is one of the most popular leisure activities for women aged 20 to 25 years of age and 85% of players being women. There is considerable debate about the number of people who play bingo worldwide, though conservative estimates put the figure at 100 million, with an increasing percentage of this number making the switch to playing online.

So let's learn a little about how this famous game first developed and how it grew in popularity into the hugely popular online pastime that it is today.

Origins

Historians have traced online bingo's ancestry back to the 16th century. The forefather of the modern game was Lo Giouco del Lotto D'Italia (the Italian National Lottery) which is still being run to this very day.

Although this initial game was very different to the bingo game we know today, the simple premise of matching numbers on a card drawn at random quickly gained popularity in Italy and continues to do so to the present day. Currently, the National Lottery contributes $75 million a year to the Italian economy.

European Export

By the 18th Century, French nobles had been drawn to the popularity of the Italian game and imported it into the courts and palaces of France. It was at this point that the playing card was first divided into three rows and nine columns and the game was played by drawing numbered wooden beads from a bag. The first player to complete a horizontal row of numbers being declared the winner.

Now popular in France and Italy, Germany was the next country to be enveloped by Lotto fever. However in a typically pragmatic way, the Germans utilised the game as a teaching tool, using it to help children learn mathematics in school. The Germans even diversified the game into other areas, such as spelling lotto, animal lotto.

American Refinement spurs massive growth

At the beginning of the 20th century, Bingo, or Lotto as it was still called, remained very much a selective past time of a few people in Europe, but that changed in 1929. A struggling toy salesman from New York named Edwin S.Lowe decided to make a late-night drive to Jacksonville to enable him to be ready for his meetings the following day.

A few miles outside the city, Lowe came across a country carnival. With time on his hands, he pulled in and parked his vehicle, noting that all the stalls in the carnival were closed bar one. Inside the packed tent, many local people were engrossed in a game the stallholder called "beano". A game he had seen while travelling around Europe.

The game was similar to the game played by the French and Germans and the stallholder told Lowe that he had seen the game while travelling in Germany the previous year and felt it would prove popular in the US.

Upon returning to New York and impressed with the popularity of the game, Lower developed his first Beano kit and invited his friends around to play the game. It was during one of these games that one of his friends, so delighted at the prospect of winning, stuttered over shouting "beano" and instead shouted "Bingo".

Lowe later admitted that this single utterance from his guest provided the inspiration behind the new name for his game.

Lowe's Bingo games proved hugely popular and the sales of the two sets of the game he produced helped his company onto a much better financial footing. The game then grew exponentially across the US as increasing numbers of people began to play the game and that proved to be something of an issue.

Resolving the problem

Lowe understood that while Bingo was now very popular, the limited number of cards in his sets meant that there would always likely be multiple winners of any game. Lowe quickly realised he needed more variation in the cards and employed a retired mathematics professor, Carl Leffler, to produce 6,000 individual bingo cards that were different to each other.

Leffler achieved the task, at the price of his sanity!

By 1934, there were more than 10,000 bingo games played across the US in a week and Lowe's firm had thousands of employees trying to keep up with demand for his new game. At one point, Lowe's printing company was using more newsprint in a year than the New York Times.

Global Export and the Digital Age.

Popular in America, the game of Bingo quickly grew in popularity across the globe. By the end of the 20th century, it was increasingly popular in the UK, where many hundreds of bingo halls had sprung into existence in towns and cities across the country. The game was also popular in Australia and New Zealand and the Far East. The games played in massive bingo halls, pubs, community halls and clubs the world over.

After steady growth over the mid-part of the 20th century, the number of people playing bingo started to decline in the 1980s and 90s and bingo halls began to close, however this chapter simply opened the door on a new era. The digital age.

With the game perfectly suited to being played online, the first online bingo game appeared in the mid 1990s, but the game really took off online following the turn of the new millennium as increasing numbers of players began to realise that playing online offered many advantages over playing in traditional halls and clubs. With many companies now offering casino services and bingo predominant amongst them, the numbers of people playing online has grown each year since.

And looks set to continue to do so for many years yet.