Edwin S. Lowe
American game designer
Edwin S. Lowe (1910 – February 23, 1986) was a U.S. salesman, toymaker, game entrepreneur and real estate developer whose promotion of a game he renamed Bingo made it popular as a national pastime and fundraising activity for churches and schools. His company the E. S. Lowe Company produced bingo games and materials in addition to plastic toys and the dice game Yahtzee. He later worked in film and stage production, including the Broadway 1981 play A Talent for Murder, featuring Claudette Colbert. Lowe also opened the Tallyho hotel on the Las Vegas Strip in 1962.
Biography
Lowe was born in Poland, the eldest son of an Orthodox rabbi, and studied in the British Mandate of Palestine before relocating to the United States at the age of eighteen. While working as a traveling toy salesman in December 1929, Lowe encountered a group at an Atlanta, Georgia carnival engaged in a game called Beano. Returning to his Brooklyn, NY, home, he organized a game with several friends, one of whom became so excited at winning, she shouted "Bingo!" The popularity of the game among his acquaintances prompted Lowe to print game cards, which he later sold under the name Bingo. He established the E. S. Lowe Company for the production of his Bingo game cards, which initially were released as 24-card sets. The company later increased the number of variations to more than 6,000 card combinations, adding to the game's popularity.
E. S. Lowe produced miniature chess and checker game sets that circulated widely among U.S. service personnel in World War II. The company continued to produce games and plastic toys after the war, including a boxed toy casino set called Monte Carlowe.
“Edwin S. Lowe” enters the record as american game designer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Edwin, Lowe and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5346794. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1910, 1986, 1981 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edwin S. Lowe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.