In 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, a down-on-his luck Charles Darrow invented the still-extremely popular board game Monopoly, making the impoverished man a millionaire seemingly overnight- a personification of the American Dream. Never able to fully explain how he came up with the concept, Darrow once described his invention as \u201ctotally unexpected\u201d and a \u201cfreak\u201d of nature. Over the last eight decades, the game has entertained hundreds of millions of people and made Darrow an exceptionally wealthy man in his lifetime, with his name forever etched in gaming lore. However, this Monopoly origin story should not pass \u201cGo\u201d and should not collect two hundred dollars. In other words, while still often repeated today, it\u2019s false. The true inventor of Monopoly was a turn-of-the-century feminist and left-wing activist Elizabeth Magie, who was looking to create a game that illustrated certain economic concepts. Here\u2019s the story behind why Darrow is given credit for the creation of one of the world\u2019s most famous board games despite having almost nothing to do with any part of its creation.<\/p>\n
The daughter of local newspaper publisher and noted abolitionist James Magie, Elizabeth Magie was raised to question the governing class. She admired her father and was often told she was a \u201cchip off the old block,\u201d which she thought of as a compliment once saying, \u201cI am proud of my father for being the kind of an \u2018old block\u2019 that he is.\u201d \u00a0As a young girl, her father exposed Magie to progressive, anti-capitalist writings and attitudes, including Henry George\u2019s 1879 best-selling book, \u201cProgress and Poverty.\u201d This influential book was the seed in which the famed game grew from.<\/p>\n
Most notable to the subject at hand, the book pushed a single land tax replacing all other taxes, positing that it would affect the wealthy more heavily, redistribute wealth, curb poverty and destroy monopolies.<\/p>\n
At the turn of the 20th century, board games were becoming all the rage. As the middle-class began to grow and work moved into factories (and away from the home) and the work day was starting to be markedly shortened (see: Why is a Typical Work Day Eight Hours Long?), the house became the center of leisure activity. Hence, the boom in creation of more complex games beyond cards or dice in the ensuing decades. Knowing that a board game would better capture the attention of her middle-class audience and thus potentially be a good vehicle to help illustrate and spread George\u2019s principles, Magie began working on games based on them. Specifically creating an anti-monopolist and a monopolist game, illustrating both sides of the issue. In 1897, the monopolist version debuted and, six years later, she patented it as \u201cThe Landlord\u2019s Game.\u201d<\/p>\n
While not quite what we play today, there are striking similarities between Magie\u2019s original game and Monopoly. Landlord\u2019s was also played with fake money and deeds which were used to pay rent, taxes and purchase property. Moving around the board, players earned wages for labor performed and got a hundred dollars for moving past the \u201cMother Earth Space\u201d \u2013 basically, this game\u2019s version of passing Go. Other spaces forced players to pay money. Public Parking and Jail were situated on the corner\u2019s boards, just like today. There were Chance cards, but they were adorned with quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Carnegie. There was even a space that read \u201cGo to Jail,\u201d which means exactly what it does today \u2013 one had to sit in jail until they rolled doubles or paid a $50 fine. The game ends when all but one person runs out of money.<\/p>\n
Magie prided herself not on the game play, but its message. \u201cIt is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,\u201d she wrote in a magazine in 1902. \u201cIt might well have been called the \u2018Game of Life,\u2019 as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world.\u201d It was also meant as not-so-thinly-veiled indictment of industrialists like John Rockefeller.<\/p>\n
Producing it in partnership with a New York-based firm, though it made her virtually no money (that was never really her goal in creating it), the Landlord\u2019s Game became a popular pastime among the liberal intellectual crowd, played often on college campuses and in the northeast. In fact, its early spread in popularity was in no small part thanks to certain professors, such as Scott Nearing of the University of Pennsylvania and later at the University of Toledo, teaching it to students as a sort of fun example of certain finance and business concepts. Importantly to its evolution to the modern version of the game, it was also embraced by Quakers.<\/p>\n
Within a decade of its launch, most of the rules we know and love today from the game were in place in one version or another, and even the name became a little more familiar.\u00a0 For instance, sometime in the 1910s a variant of the game called Auction Monopoly popped up that shortened the game play slightly from the original, which required buying properties at their list price.\u00a0 The Quakers would later drop the auction part in their version of the game for unclear reasons, restoring that part of the rules closer to the original 1904 version.<\/p>\n
In these modified games, people tended to customize the names of the properties to fit their locality and slightly tweak the rules to their liking. (This is a trend that has continued with Monopoly, see: What Does Free Parking Do and the Many Other Ways in Which You\u2019re Playing Monopoly Wrong That Makes it Take Longer)<\/p>\n
By the 1920s, some began trying to profit from sales of their version of the game, such as one Dan Layman, who tried to patent his own version called The Fascinating Game of Finance (later just Finance) but failed when Magie\u2019s patent was discovered by Layman\u2019s attorney. Instead, Layman copyrighted and began selling his version of the board for the game.<\/p>\n
After her patent expired, Magie decide to patent an updated version of her game in 1924. This updated version included minor changes from the original such as making it so that if you owned all of each of the railroads or utilities, you could charge higher rents on those properties.\u00a0 She also introduced chips which signified properties had been upgraded, allowing the owner to charge more rent than otherwise.<\/p>\n
So how does Charles Darrow come into the story?<\/p>\n
Sometime around 1932, Darrow and his wife Esther were invited over for a dinner and a board game at the house of Oliver and Charles Todd, a Philadelphia businessman and a Quaker. Together, they played a Quaker version of Landlord\u2019s Game.<\/p>\n
Todd later stated of this,<\/p>\n