by Phil Mason
The pitchman said he had seen the game in Germany, where it was called ‘Lotto’. He had called it Beano because, in the South, beans were readily available to use as markers. Lowe described the crowd as impenetrable. Everyone seemed addicted, and slightly overcome by the tense excitement. One small girl caught Lowe’s ear. She was jumping up and down having completed her line and realising she could claim her prize of a small doll. But she shouted not ‘beano’ but ‘B-B-Bingo’.
‘I cannot describe the strange sense of elation which that girl’s shriek brought to me,’ Lowe later wrote. ‘I was going to come out with this game – and it was going to be called Bingo!’ (Sources disagree whether this episode took place that night, or later when Lowe was trying out the game with friends back in New York.)
What is certain is that Lowe did not make a fortune. He could have tried to copyright the name ‘Bingo’ but chose not to. He realised that, as the game itself was already in the public domain, trying to restrict competition would have been futile and legally costly. Curiously, he was able to be satisfied that one deserving cause benefited. In the early years, the game was adopted principally by the Catholic Church in America as a money-raising venture for poor parishes.