It’s eyes down and dobbers at the ready for bingo’s biggest jackpot. On September 15, bingo fans will be playing for the first ever £1million cash prize.
The new game - the Big N - will be played twice a day at 500 bingo halls across the country until someone wins the lot.
National Bingo Game Association spokesman Steve Baldwin says: “This is the largest-ever jackpot game in bingo’s history.”
And what a history it’s been - from the most basic bean markers to the Mirror’s ever-changing online sites, we take a look at the best of bingo…
It’s as old as the pyramids
Despite what you might think the popular game has, ahem, bingo-ing for centuries. Historians believe the Ancient Egyptians were playing with marked cards long before they got round to building pyramids.
Hundreds of years later a version of bingo, very much like the modern lottery, was being played in Italy. In 1530, during the unification of that country, the National Lottery was born - Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia - which is still played today.
The French followed suit in the 18th century with Le Lotto, which was primarily a hobby of the upper classes. A caller would draw wooden discs numbered from one to 90 out of a bag and call them out to players.
Each player had a game board divided into nine rows and three columns and the winner was the first to cross off all the numbers.
But it wasn’t until the 1920s that the current popular format was born in the States. Toymaker Edwin Lowe came across a novel fairground game “Beano” at a carnival in Jacksonville, Georgia, where each player had a wooden card of numbers and a handful of beans.
When a number was called out, the player used a bean to knock it off their board. Knock off a straight line either vertically, horizontally or diagonally and you win a prize of a kewpie doll.
“When he finally closed at 3am, he had to chase them out… the players were practically addicted to the game,” Lowe recalled.
Back in New York, Lowe showed his friends how to play and one of his party was so excited at filling in the line, she shouted “bingo” instead of “beano”. The name stuck and Lowe marketed the first game, charging just one dollar.
Today, bingo has nowhere near the same appeal in America as it does in Britain and is mostly played in half-empty church halls.
In the UK, bingo owes its success to the 1960 Gambling Act, which allowed such betting activities in members-only clubs. The following year, Miss World founder Eric Morley brought the game to our shores.
The invention of the TV had rendered many theatres, dance halls and cinemas obsolete. So when bingo became popular, many of these fine buildings were converted into bingo halls.
And while the Americans might have developed the game, it was the Brits who brought in the balls. To add to the razzmatazz, glass cabinets fitted with fans and filled with numbered ping-pong balls were used to produce the numbers.
But these were difficult to build and unreliable. And in the 1970s, they were replaced by the Random Numbers Generator.
Source: Mirror UK
