Edwin S. Lowe

Edwin S. Lowe was born in Poland in 1910, the eldest son of an Orthodox rabbi, studied in the British Mandate of Palestine and came to the United States at eighteen. Travelling as a toy salesman in December 1929 he stopped at a carnival in Atlanta and watched a game called Beano. He played it back home in Brooklyn with friends; one of them shouted "Bingo!" on winning, and he kept the word. He printed the cards, built the number of card combinations past six thousand, and made Bingo the fundraising game of American churches and schools. His E. S. Lowe Company later took a dice game a Canadian couple played on their yacht, named it Yahtzee and sold it to the world; Milton Bradley bought the company in 1973 for 26 million dollars.