Generocity or Conceit – What Made Bingo Popular (History of Bingo – part II)
Let me continue with the exciting history of the Bingo game. 
To refresh you memory about the how the story began I will remind you that contemporary Bingo is a straight descendant of Italian Lotteries, played as long as in 1530s.
Long after it was brought to the US from Germany in a form of game played with the help of carton cards and beans. It was called Beano for that reason. This simple algorithm of pulling out numbers from a cigar box and putting beans to the carton cards with the aim to cover lines with beans not only has saved a toy producing company owner Edwin S. Lowe by name, but also brought him fame and fortune.
Allow me telling you more details about this magic transformation of an unpretentious Beano game into a very popular and highly profitable game of Bingo.
When Ed Lowe returned home to NY, he immediately bought some beans and some cardboard. He drew numbers on the carton cards and invited his friends to try playing Beano. Very soon after a game started he noticed that his friends were playing with the same excitement and tension he saw in Jacksonville’s carnival.
That was that very day when Bingo appeared. One of the invited guests screamed excitedly “BEAN-GO!” instead of the already habitual “Beano!” And that made the game.
Some time after Lowe started selling his Bingo game in his toy shop. The game was presented in two variants – one-dollar 12 card set and two-dollar 24 card set for the game. The game was selling like hot pies and soon returned the dying Lowe’s business to the successful road.
The game was trademarked, but still could not be fully protected from the imitations because of the coming out of the public domain. Since the game was so popular there appeared too many solicitous to get a piece of Lowe’s fortune. The history doesn’t know if Lowe was too gracious or too conceited, but anyway he asked his competitors to pay him a dollar annually for the permission to call their games Bingo. The price was really low for litigation escape and made them agree to the conditions, and the original Bingo game became generic. This was a Bingo boom that glorified Edwin Lowe and brought citizens of the US an exciting game of chance.
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