Perhaps, closer to the game we see today is the French lottery, Le Lotto which derived from the Italian lottery. Reportedly popular during the late 18th century with wealthy Frenchmen, this game of chance involved a caller drawing out wooden discs numbered 1 to 90 from a bag and shouting them out to the game players. Each player had just one single card divided into 3 rows and 9 columns with numbers organised in much the same way as a modern bingo card. Column 1 had random numbers between 1 and 10, Column 2 between 11 and 20 and so on up to 81-90 on the last column. In addition, every Row had judt 5 numbers and 4 blanks. The winner would be the first person to cover the numbers on an entire row.

Later versions of Le Lotto appeared in Germany, where instead of being used as a gambling game, they were instead used for educational purposes for example to teach children their times tables. Today, similar games can still be found on the market, although naturally as far removed from the original purpose as possible...

The first real push into the English speaking world came in the late 1920's when a hard up New York toy salesman by the name of Edwin S. Lowe stumbled across a carnival game in Georgia. The game of Beano, as the booth-owner called it, involved a caller drawing numbered wooded discs from a bag and shouting them out to the waiting players. Each player had a game card with numbered squares and some dried beans. Every time a number was called out which was on their card, they would mark it with a bean. The first player to have a straight line of beans, either in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal direction was declared the winner. Such was the popularity of this game that try as he might, Lowe didn't get to play that night but the idea was formed.

Rushing back to New York he invited friends over to his appartment to play this new game. They became immediately hooked and at one point, so excited was one female member of the party, that instead of shouting out "Beano!" to signify she had won, she yelled "Bingo!" instead. The name stuck and Lowe went on to create the first commercialised version of the game, retailing at $1 for a 12 card set and $2 for a 24 cards.

Bingo found it's way out of the family room and onto a grand scale thanks to the fund-raising efforts of a priest from Pennsylvania. The priest had seen a great opportunity to raise money for his church by holding bingo gaming events but had ran into an unfortunate problem. The game cards would produce tens of winners each game instead of the desired one or two, because they had never been designed to be played en-masse. The subsequent quest to find 6000 cards with 6000 different number combinations (in the pre-computer age!) took many months and reputedly drove the university professor charged with the task quite insane. Literally.

By 1934 it was estimated more than 10,000 bingo games were being played a week and today, the national game grosses over $90 million a week in America alone.