Bingo History

It then made it over the Atlantic and was played as a charity fundraiser. At this stage it was called Beano as you marked off your cards by placing beans over the numbers as they were called. In fact it is apparently when someone mispronounced “beano” that the word Bingo was born!

As ever, it was in the US that bingo was really commercialised. A New York businessman spotted the commercial opportunity and hired a mathematician Carl Heffer to devise unique bingo cards. It was in making 6000 of these that poor Mr Heffer reportedly went insane...

It was in the 1960s that bingo came to the UK on a big scale. With the advent of television, a man called Eric Morley decided running bingo games would be a good way to fill the now empty theatres and cinemas. Eric Morley later went on to found one of best known bingo halls, Mecca Bingo.

Over time the game grew and grew in popularity until the first purpose-built bingo hall was built in the 1980s. The game itself grew more and more sophisticated with Random Number Generators, a whole bingo lingo and “Caller of the Year” competitions.

Now the game has moved online where it is a multi-million pound business and still growing.