We have all played it to exhaustion and there have been real spats with family and friends because of it. He Monopoly is he most successful modern board game and it fulfills the basic premise of embracing capitalism in its purest essence to cover ourselves. That’s the idea that Charles Darrow, the original creator who copyrighted the title in 1935, had in mind. Or at least that’s what we thought.
Both premises are false, although for this one must take a look at the true origins of the work. A report from The New York Times revealed that we owe the creation of Monopoly to Elizabeth Magie, a woman born in Illinois in 1866 and who did not fit the female profile of the time by any means.
an unusual woman
She worked as a stenographer, secretary, wrote poetry and stories, performed comedy on stage and did not get married until she was 44 years old. She supported herself until that age, which is quite a feat for those times considering the role of women in society. So much so that raised his voice against the situation of the female population with a good dose of humor.
She offered herself as an “American slave girl” in the newspapers at the time, along with her salary of just $10 and a house she had bought in Washington, along with several acres. “We’re not machines. Girls have minds, desires, hopes, and ambitions,” Magie explained. As she cannot be otherwise, she also had very strong political convictions.
With a progressive profile, Magie wanted to capture her idea that the market monopoly was a terrible result of capitalism exercised by magnates like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Antitrust thoughts were fueled by the book left by his father, Jamie Magie. Progress and Poverty, written by Henry George, argued that 100% of the work had to correspond to all the members of a community and so Elizabeth internalized it. To get the message across better, she embodied her vision in Landlord’s Game, a board game she copyrighted in 1903 that featured two sets of rules.
In the first, the players won together the more wealth they generated together, while the second rule book showed the well-known monopolistic version with which the opponents had to be completely wiped out. She believed that those who played the game would simply judge the first set of rules to be morally superior and would prefer it.
The result was completely the opposite, popularly imposing the Landlord’s Game with a monopoly approach. The success was immediate for a time when electricity allowed leisure time to be extended and with the fortune that his game had a rectangular distribution that brought the players together. Details like the unforgettable “Go to jail” were already present, although we could read the phrase “Work on mother earth produces wages“, which is linked to Henry George. This is how he explained his game to The Single Tax Review in 1902:
“It’s a practical demonstration of the current system of land grabbing with all its usual results and consequences. It might as well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of real-world success and failure, and the The objective is the same as that which the human race in general seems to have, that is, the accumulation of wealth.”
The unexpected scam
At 37 years old, Magie registers the game with the patent office and becomes part of the minuscule 1% of applications made by a woman. Despite this, it was not the first time that she appeared there, since she devised a device to facilitate the use of paper in typewriters. Entering the equation is Charles Darrow, an unemployed stove salesman, who takes the monopoly version of Landlord’s Game that had key modifications.
Fixed prices were set to the boxes and properties named after Atlantic City streets were placed. This edition was sold to Parker Brothers, one of the current divisions of the Hasbro company, signing a copyright agreement. The company turned to Magie and bought him the patent for both Landlord’s Game as well as two more games for $500 to avoid any legal problems. She saw it as an investment in the future, as Parker Brothers would be a major showcase.
However, the patent they took was for The Landlord’s Game and Prosperity, a new edition from 1920 that still included the two game options. The company barely promoted this version and fiercely imposed Darrow’s Monopoly. Years later, an economics professor named Ralph Anspach investigated the matter and took Parker Brothers to court.
During that litigation, Chairman Robert Barton declared Magie’s game “utterly worthless” and a very short run was made “just to make her happy”. Magie herself complained bitterly about how she had been cheated and she passed away in 1948, a widow and childless, without the popular recognition she would have deserved.
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