The Toys That Built America

As a Nazi bombing campaign terrorizes England...

A third wave of German bombers

are reportedly heading to-

I repeat, a third wave-

Heading towards Birmingham.

One man brings his neighbors together

to lift their spirits.

Anthony Pratt, he used to play piano

at murder mystery parties.

And he had this brilliant idea

to turn these murder mysteries

into an actual board game.

Imagine we're all at an English country house,

but something has happened.

Murder.

We start in the gun room.

What begins as a way to escape the horrors

of war will one day spread far beyond the bomb shelter

to become a global sensation, selling over 150 million units,

launching a multimedia franchise

that includes a cult classic film

and leads the way for a post-war reinvention of board games.

- (dice rattling) - Ready?

- Ah! - Hey. (laughing)

In this period of tranquility,

we see the rise of mind games.

Premium squares getting bigger towards the edge.

You really start to see barriers being broken down

in terms of how you would play games.

Now, the fun begins.

The inventors of Clue, Scrabble,

and Yahtzee had one thing in common.

They believed the sense of fun could be combined

with a thinking game.

Three innovators who break the mold.

You got a deal.

To forever change the way we play.

Sold them all? Bingo.

Pre-World War II,

a lot of board games were completely mindless.

Games were really just dumbed down games

of chance for children.

There was a lot of dice rolling,

a lot of flicking a spinner, drawing cards,

that sort of thing.

Or games which required an intense level of skill

and intelligence to play.

But nothing in between.

Nothing that sort of was a bit of both, and honestly,

the country really wasn't ready for something new.

As the Great Depression takes hold,

Americans still find fun in simple pleasures.

Ladies and gentlemen, are we ready?

- Yeah! - Excellent!

Excellent, we're feeling lucky.

Something 19-year-old,

door-to-door toy salesman Edwin Lowe is looking

to cash in on.

Lowe is an immigrant. He believes in the American dream.

Anybody can make it and anybody can be rich.

His father, a rabbi, tells him,

"If you're gonna be a successful salesman,

you need confidence and you need determination."

He's toying around down in the South

and stumbles across a community night.

Our next number is nine!

Lady Luck is in the house tonight!

And he saw this gambling-style game

that they were referring to as Beano,

and the people playing literally put beans on the board

and would yell out Beano when they had the proper number

of squares covered.

Do we have 23?

- No. - No! Oh, my.

So the origins of the game goes all the way back to 1530.

It is an Italian game known as Lotto.

It became very popular in Europe

and eventually made its way to America

around the 1920s or so.

Do we have eights?

- Yeah! - Oh, my God!

Ah.

Lowe thinks Beano is exactly what Americans

in the grip of the depression are looking for.

A simple game of chance, easy to learn and fun to play.

He realized instantly

that this game could be a massive hit.

He brought it back home, played it with some friends,

and in a highly serendipitous moment,

a friend of his got so excited, instead of shouting Beano,

she stood up and shouted, "Bingo!"

And the rest is history.

Stumbling on the game Beano

and then rechristening it, "Bingo"

was very lucky.

Hello? Yeah, uh-huh.

But everything else Lowe did after this was very smart

and good, old-fashioned hard work.

In 1930, Lowe establishes his own toy company,

becoming the very first to mass produce Bingo cards.

Lowe started to make Bingo an industry.

He literally had two factories and he claimed

that he was using more paper than the New York Times

to print the Bingo cards.

Thanks in large part to his ability to market the game,

Bingo took off like wildfire.

Because of the ease of producing it,

the low cost of participating in it,

and its deep acceptance in church communities,

Bingo becomes a hit during one of the darkest times

in American history.

As Bingo looks to be Lowe's ticket to success,

across the East River,

another man is still looking for his ticket

out of the unemployment line.

Alfred Butts was born in Poughkeepsie, New York,

studied architecture.

He designed single family homes.

And then, the depression hit and Butts lost his job.

He didn't know what to do.

He made prints that he would try to sell.

He wrote short stories that would get rejected

and he was struggling, for sure.

But in his downtime,

he starts noticing an interesting trend.

Just like we saw during COVID,

the board game industry blossomed

during the Great Depression.

If you don't have the money to go out,

the board game is actually a pretty good way

to pass the time.

Anytime there's any kind of economic downturn,

I think games sort of answer the call.

This keen observation

gets his wheels turning.

It was really a financial question for him.

He didn't have a game idea.

He decided, "I'm going to make a game to make some money.

Now, I need to think of what that game is."

He laid out the three basic kinds of board games.

Men on a board, card games, word games.

And he listed a bunch of the first two kinds

that were very popular, chess, backgammon,

checkers, bridge.

But he wasn't really seeing a hit word game

and he was right.

The only thing that really is out there is this game anagrams,

just a basic word formation game.

Players form a word and lay it down on the table

and then try to add to the words

that have already been formed to make new words,

which really wasn't very much fun.

There really wasn't a word game

that makes you wanna play it again and again,

creating a huge market opportunity.

I've got a U, what do I do with a U?

Butts looked at the game anagrams

and decided that the problem with it was

that it was just too hard to make words.

It looks like there's not enough vowels there.

Then it hits him.

He can make an improved version of anagrams.

And this was a guy that had a very organized,

mathematical, almost computer-like mind.

He recognized we use more of certain letters

than other letters in word formation

that what you needed was for the pieces

to reflect the English language.

For more insight,

he remembers an obscure story he's recently read.

So Edgar Allan Poe, in his short story, "The Gold-Bug",

there's a sequence where a character's trying

to break a code and Poe lists the letters of the alphabet

in the order of their frequency in the English language

to help solve that code.

"Now, in English, the letter

which most frequently occurs is E.

Afterwards, succession runs A, O, I, D."

He sensed, this isn't exactly right,

and if I can figure out the correct frequencies

of letters in the English language-

Figured it out.

That'll make my anagrams spinoff more fun.

But he has his work cut out for him.

Counting how many times letters appear in words

in 1930 is a really daunting task.

Today, you could go do a search for a letter and instantly,

you are told there's 50 S's in this essay.

He can't do that.

He has to literally count those S's one by one.

While Butts takes on

a seemingly insurmountable challenge,

Edwin Lowe is about to experience one of his own.

Good evening.

Unfortunately, with success comes imitation.

And the market's flooded with a bunch

of imitation Bingo cards.

What's this?

The problem with Bingo was it's very easy

to print Bingo cards.