She Invented Monopoly To Warn About Greed. A Man Stole The Credit.

In 1866, Lizzie Magie was born in Macomb, Illinois, the child of anti-slavery newspaper publisher James K. Magie. James entertained and toured with Abraham Lincoln while Lincoln debated Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, and he taught Lizzie the same reform politics. Lizzie inherited his anti-monopoly beliefs that led to her designing a board game years later.

In the early 1890s, Magie was employed as a typist and stenographer by the federal government in Washington, D.C. In 1893, she came up with an attachment to feed paper into the typewriter, which solved a common problem with the machines, the friction in feeding the paper. She was awarded U.S. Patent No. 498,129 by the Patent Office on May 23, 1893. Fewer than 1% of all patents issued were to women, making Magie an experienced inventor before her board game invention.

Magie later met Henry George, a political economist who wrote a book entitled Progress and Poverty (1879) that espoused the idea that landowners were profiting off the appreciation of their property, rather than contributing anything of value themselves. As a solution, George suggested a Single Tax on land value. He was a supporter of freehold, meaning the right to own the fruits of one’s own labor and capital, and he believed in free market competition. Magie, who at this point was living in Washington, D.C., became involved with the George movement and believed a board game would be the best vehicle for disseminating his ideas.

Back in 1903, 37-year-old Magie sketched her game, entitled The Landlord’s Game, on a piece of oilcloth in Brentwood, Maryland. It consisted of 40 squares in a loop, 22 of which were generic properties (such as “Beggar’s Alley”), a Jail square, paper deeds and a cash payout every time a player made it all the way around the board. So the basic structure of the game we know today was in place decades before Charles Darrow, the salesman given credit for coming up with the game.

Magie’s game actually came with two sets of rules. The “Monopolist” rules are essentially what people play today: amass properties, collect rents, drive your opponents into debt and eventually bankruptcy. The other set, called “Anti-Monopolist” or “Prosperity,” focused on a common treasury into which all land taxes were paid. Under these rules, all players won once even the least wealthy person at the table doubled their initial investment. Magie intended to use both sets of rules to illustrate the contrasts between them. Historians note that when the game was playtested, most often in communities such as at Penn’s Wharton School and the Arden single-tax colony, the “Monopolist” rules were usually played.

U.S. Patent No. 748,626 was issued to Magie by the U.S. Patent Office on January 5, 1904. The patent covers the game board Magie designed in Brentwood, Maryland, the previous year. This patent filing created a government-datestamped record proving Magie owned the board design that others would later steal and rebrand.

After numerous rejections from publishers, Magie organized the Economic Game Company in 1906 with Chicago organizer E.H. Monroe and Single-Tax lawyer Edward G. Leubuscher, who released the first produced version of The Landlord’s Game. She also ran a parody ad in a Washington, D.C., paper in 1906 declaring that she was a “young woman American slave” for sale as a social commentary on the low wages and lack of financial independence of women at the time.

The commune of Arden, Delaware, established in 1900 around Henry George’s Single-Tax theory, had a quasi-constant round of Magie’s Landlord’s Game from 1903 to 1910. There, residents like the muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, hand-stitched cloth versions of the board and modified the rules as they went along. By 1913, the game was sold in Britain by a publisher in Dumfries, which produced its own “official” British edition. Magie didn’t earn a penny, but her game spread.

In 1909, the creator of the board game manufacturing company Parker Brothers, George S. Parker, visited Magie, who was then living in Salem, Massachusetts, to see her game. Although he did not like The Landlord’s Game because it was complicated and political for a game meant for families, the company did acquire and publish another one of her smaller games, a card game titled Mock Trial, at about the same time.

The radical economics professor Scott Nearing had begun teaching his students at Penn’s Wharton School about corporate monopolies in 1908 by showing them the Landlord’s Game. They copied the board by hand and lent it out to their friends at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton. It spread, renamed “Monopoly,” from school to school. Nearing popularized it, but the design was still all Magie’s.

Magie married Albert Phillips, a sympathetic publisher, in 1910 at age 44. They lived together in Virginia, near Washington, D.C., in a town called Clarendon. From that point forward, in public records, she was known as Elizabeth Magie Phillips. She remained married to Albert until his death in 1937. Her private life no longer made headlines, but her game still circulated freely among colleges and communes, never with her name attached.

When Magie’s original patent expired, she submitted an amended application and was awarded another patent on September 23, 1924, for an improvement on The Landlord’s Game. In this version there were satirical cards like “Caught robbing the public; players will now call you ‘Senator.’” That patent stood for a long time, and it would prove crucial when a certain salesman came along.

In 1929 or so, Ruth Hoskins, a teacher at a Quaker school in Atlantic City, New Jersey, learned of the folk version of Magie’s game. Hoskins made a new board with actual Atlantic City streets, including Boardwalk and Park Place, grouping the properties by color. This Atlantic City Quaker board was the immediate model for the modern Monopoly board, and it existed three years before Charles Darrow, the salesman who would take credit for the game, ever saw one.

In 1932, Charles Darrow, an unemployed heater salesman from Germantown, Pennsylvania, attended a dinner party hosted by his friend Charles Todd, where Todd played the Todds’ version of the game. Mrs. Todd typed the rules and drew the game board on a sheet of oilcloth for Darrow. In doing so she misspelled “Marven Gardens,” the name of a neighborhood in Atlantic City, as “Marvin Gardens.” Darrow reproduced this spelling mistake on his own version of the board and subsequently claimed he had invented the entire game. He cut off all communication with the Todds.

In 1934, Charles Darrow took his copied game to Parker Brothers, only to be told that his game had “52 fundamental errors” and was too long and complicated. Undaunted, Darrow had around 5,000 sets of the game printed, with his friend, Franklin Alexander, drawing the cover art. The games sold quickly at a Philadelphia department store. Parker Brothers took notice of Darrow’s success and approached Darrow in early 1935 to purchase the copyright to his game. Parker Brothers went on to sell Monopoly games across the country, making Darrow wealthy.

However, Parker Brothers’ lawyers discovered that the game’s actual inventor, Lizzie Magie, still held an active patent on its mechanics. Parker Brothers founder George Parker traveled to Magie’s home in Arlington, Virginia, and offered her $500 cash, with no royalties, to give permission for Parker Brothers to mass-produce and distribute The Landlord’s Game, and therefore Henry George’s message about land tax, to millions of players. Magie agreed to Parker’s offer and signed off with a handwritten note: “Farewell, my beloved brain-child.”

Parker Brothers, when they went to market Monopoly during the depths of the Great Depression, told the rags-to-riches story of an entrepreneurial dad, stating on the rule sheets that the unemployed Charles Darrow invented the game in his basement alone. They bought up and then threw away all the handmade boards they could find, hiding the physical evidence of how Monopoly evolved through Lizzie Magie, Wharton students and Atlantic City Quakers.

In January of 1936, The Washington Evening Star and The Washington Post sat down with 70-year-old Magie for an interview. Posed next to a copy of Monopoly and two versions of The Landlord’s Game (one from 1904, and one from 1924), Magie called Darrow an appropriator. “There is nothing new under the sun,” she said. She’d spent more money making The Landlord’s Game than she’d ever gotten back. But Monopoly kept selling just fine for Parker Brothers, and Darrow’s version of the game was never changed.

Parker Brothers did as they had agreed to do: they printed two more Lizzie Magie games (King’s Men and Bargain Day) and even reissued a very small number of The Landlord’s Game copies. Neither Parker Brothers nor anyone else advertised the new titles, and so they quickly disappeared. Magie found steady work as a typist for the U.S. Office of Education, while the income she reported from games in the census was $0. She died at the age of 81 in Arlington, Virginia. There was no mention of Monopoly in her death notice.

During World War II, special Monopoly sets were made by Britain’s escape-and-evasion directorate, MI9, and Monopoly’s British rights holder Waddingtons. These special editions of the game contained escape maps sewn into the board using real silk, compasses within the playing pieces, and German money instead of play currency. The games were sent via fake relief organizations to German-run Allied prisoner-of-war camps, and hundreds of airmen used the Monopoly board to escape. Meanwhile, Monopoly continued to travel the world, still carrying Darrow’s version of its history.

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