Monopoly who invented the game

In the s, at the height of the Great Depression, a down-on-his- luck family man named Charles Darrow invented a game to entertain his friends and loved ones, using an oilcloth as a playing surface.

He called the game Monopoly, and when he sold it to Parker Brothers he became fantastically rich—an inspiring Horatio Alger tale of homegrown innovation if ever there was one. Or is it? But she also appeared in plays, and wrote poetry and short stories. In , she patented a gadget that fed different-sized papers through a typewriter and allowed more type on a single page. A dedicated feminist, with socialist leanings, Ms. Magie received several patents, wrote poetry, and devised clever campaigns to force society to confront the civil inequalities of her day.

Magie was particularly influenced by Henry George, whose book, Progress and Poverty , espoused a belief that workers should own what they produce, but that the natural resources and economic rents derived from land should be owned by society as a whole. Magie created The Landlord's Game and applied for a patent in The intent of the game was to demonstrate the evils of concentrated landownership.

The game was played by like-minded socialists, eventually making its way in to Scott Nearing, a professor at The Wharton School and Swarthmore College.

Anspach published the Anti-Monopoly game in , which eventually came to the attention of Parker Brothers, who took legal action to remove the game from the market. He eventually reached a settlement with Parker Brothers and his game remains available to this day.

While gathering research for his legal defense, Mr. Anspach discovered that Ms. Furthermore, he uncovered the fact that Parker Brothers paid Ms. Parker Brothers also agreed to acquire two additional games created by Ms. Serving out their time meant waiting until they threw a double. And, somewhat surprisingly, Lizzie created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.

Her vision was an embrace of dualism and contained a contradiction within itself, a tension trying to be resolved between opposing philosophies. At least two years later, she published a version of the game through the Economic Game Company, a New York—based firm that counted Lizzie as a part-owner.

The game became popular with leftwing intellectuals and on college campuses, and that popularity spread throughout the next three decades; it eventually caught on with a community of Quakers in Atlantic City, who customised it with the names of local neighbourhoods, and from there it found its way to Charles Darrow. In total, the game that Darrow brought to Parker Brothers has now sold hundreds of millions copies worldwide, and he received royalties throughout his life.

Lizzie was paid by Parker Brothers, too. When the game started to take off in the mids, the company bought up the rights to other related games to preserve its territory. At first, Lizzie did not suspect the true motives for the purchase of her game. Eventually, though, the truth dawned on her — and she became publicly angry. She was angry, hurt and in search of revenge against a company that she felt had stolen her now-best-selling idea.

She had invented the game, and she could prove it. It took Charles B Darrow, a Philadelphia engineer, who retrieved the game from the oblivion of the Patent Office and dressed it up a bit, to get it going. Last August a large firm manufacturing games took over his improvements. In November, Mrs Phillips [Magie, who had by now married] sold the company her patent rights. It was to little avail. And so did Lizzie Magie. She died in , a widow with no children, whose obituary and headstone made no mention of her game invention.

One of her last jobs was at the US Office of Education, where her colleagues knew her only as an elderly typist who talked about inventing games.