THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA by Marvin Kaye Read Free Book Online Page A

describe the strange sense of elation which that girl’s shriek brought to me,” Lowe said. “All I could think of was that I was going to come out with this game—and it was going to be called Bingo!”
    Another surprise was in store for the businessman that night, because his guests behaved exactly like the carnival crowd. Refusing to leave, even after the prizes ran out, they stayed to play for money. Lowe watched in amazement.
    At that time, his company was producing three other items. Bingo became the fourth, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind which was the winner. The earliest Lowe edition came in two prices: a twelve-card set for one dollar retail, and a two-dollar set with twice as many cards. Bingo took off like a rocket, quickly putting the sinking company on its feet.
    Imitations came out as fast as other companies could print them. Although the game was derived from one in public domain, the name Bingo could have been guarded. But Lowe did not put much stock in idea protection. His firm couldn’t possibly meet the terrific demand for Bingo anyway, so he told his competitors to pay him a dollar a year and call their games Bingo, too. In this way, Bingo became the generic term for the game. Had Lowe decided to protect the name, he would have become involved in one legal action after another. So many Bingo imitators came out in 1929-30 that he couldn’t even keep track of them.
    Lowe’s attitude is not unusually stoic for a toymaker. Knocking off, as industrial copying is called, is an almost universal practice. Even firms that complain about copiers are rarely guiltless. Copying has become so commonplace that some businessmen figure the probable effect of future knockoffs into the initial cost projections for new products.
    About a month after the game appeared, Bingo’s unique position in American culture was secured when a priest from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, laid his parish problems on Lowe’s doorstep. The priest’s church was in grave financial trouble, and a woman parishioner had suggested the new game of Bingo as a way of raising money. An early test session proved popular, and the priest bought several games. But there was one drawback to the scheme: too many prizes had to be distributed. With only twenty-four basic cards, as many as ten winners could claim loot after every game.
    As the priest spoke, Lowe began to see the tremendous fund-raising possibilities of Bingo. But to allow a larger profit margin for the promoters, the game would have to include more combinations of numbers on the cards.
    Lowe went to an elderly professor of mathematics at Columbia University, Carl Leffler, and asked him to devise
    six thousand new Bingo cards with nonrepeating number groupings—a mind-boggling task.
    Leffler agreed, and started turning out new combinations at a fixed price per card. But the problem grew more difficult with every new card, and the professor could not work fast enough. As an incentive, Lowe raised the price per card, but by the time Leffler was half done, he was becoming “very difficult to handle,” according to Lowe. “We were driving him, offering him as much as a hundred dollars a combination toward the last. It was a terribly tough job. I was going daffy myself checking those cards.”
    The lure of the money and the challenge of the project evidently wouldn’t let Leffler quit. Eventually, with Lowe’s continued prodding, he succeeded in producing all six thousand cards.
    He also went insane.
    The subsequent history of Bingo is happier. It became so popular as a fund-raising activity in town halls and churches— including the Wilkes-Barre parish, which was saved—that Lowe distributed a free booklet on the customs of the Bingo party: how large a group to accommodate, the proper ratio of prizes to profit, and so on. By 1934, there were ten thousand weekly public Bingo games throughout the country. Though the craze has since abated, Bingo is still firmly entrenched in