This text is a part of Ignored, a sequence of obituaries about outstanding folks whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Instances.
When Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman in Philadelphia, discovered a couple of new board sport that was changing into in style, he requested his mates to kind up the foundations and assist him jazz up the graphic design. In 1933, he copyrighted the sport, Monopoly, as his personal invention and started promoting it in toy shops and department shops.
The sport, which concerned actual property buying and selling, would go on to promote greater than 275 million copies, has been licensed in a whole lot of spinoff editions and has change into a part of the material of American life. It additionally made Darrow a millionaire. However credit score for the concept behind it mustn’t have been his. Somewhat, it belonged to a girl from Illinois with a flexible résumé that included writing, performing, engineering and dealing as a stenographer: Lizzie Magie.
The premise of Magie’s sport, initially referred to as The Landlord’s Sport, could be acquainted to anybody who has performed Monopoly: Folks transfer their tokens across the perimeter of a sq. board, shopping for actual property alongside the way in which, which they will use to cost lease to different gamers. Magie patented her invention in 1904 — the identical day that the Wright brothers filed one for his or her airplane — and it was printed in 1906 via the Financial Sport Firm, of which she was an proprietor.
In her patent software, Magie wrote, “Every time a participant goes across the board he’s purported to have carried out a lot labor upon Mom Earth, for which after passing the beginning-point he receives his wages, 100 {dollars}.”
Magie designed the sport with two units of guidelines: one which rewarded the gamers when sources had been shared equally, and one other the place the winner was the land baron who acquired probably the most wealth. Both approach, she hoped that gamers would take into consideration the underpinnings of capitalist society.
Elizabeth Jones Magie was born on Might 9, 1866, in Macomb, Ailing., to a political household. Based on Mary Pilon’s 2015 e-book, “The Monopolists,” her father, James Magie, was an abolitionist newspaper writer who reported on the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. Her mom was Mary (Ritchie) Magie.
At varied factors, Magie was a poet; a stenographer on the Useless Letter Workplace, the place mail thought-about undeliverable landed; a comedic stage actress; an engineer who invented and patented a tool that improved the movement of paper in typewriters; and a fiction author. Her brief story “The Theft of a Mind,” printed in Godey’s, a ladies’s journal, was a couple of author who finds success after unlocking her potential below hypnosis solely to find that her hypnotist had plagiarized her novel.
Magie conceived of The Landlord’s Sport as an ideological software: a sport that will educate folks concerning the ideas of the political economist Henry George. The central tenet of Georgism was that folks ought to preserve all that they earned, however that the federal government ought to be funded by a tax on actual property homeowners, since land rightly belonged to everybody. A society funded by a single land tax, George believed, would get rid of each lower-class poverty and industrial cartels.
Within the guidelines of The Landlord’s Sport, Magie defined how potential conflicts might be resolved: “Ought to any emergency come up which isn’t coated by the foundations of the sport, the gamers should settle the matter between themselves; but when a participant completely refuses to obey the foundations as above set forth he should go to jail and stay there till he throws a double or pays his superb.”
The Landlord’s Sport wasn’t a blockbuster hit, nevertheless it developed pockets of followers, together with utopian Quakers in Delaware and fraternity brothers at Williams School in Massachusetts; the sport was even tailored for the British market below the title “Brer Fox an’ Brer Rabbit.”
It wasn’t Magie’s solely creation: She invented a number of card video games, together with a role-playing one referred to as Mock Trial, which she bought to Parker Brothers in 1910. That yr, she additionally tried to promote them The Landlord’s Sport, however the firm deemed it too advanced.
By then, she had additionally acquired some nationwide consideration for a publicity stunt she had carried out in 1906, when she positioned a newspaper commercial providing herself on the market as a “younger lady American slave,” with “giant gray-green eyes, full passionate lips” and “splendid enamel” who was “not stunning, however very engaging,” and describing herself as “trustworthy, simply, poetical, philosophical.”
The advert was meant to be a commentary on slavery and the awful financial prospects of single ladies, nevertheless it as an alternative led to undesirable marriage proposals and a suggestion of employment with a freak present. (Magie finally did get married, on the age of 44, to Albert Phillips, a businessman.) It additionally led to correspondence with the muckraking author Upton Sinclair and work as a newspaper reporter.
Within the meantime, gamers had been changing The Landlord’s Sport into selfmade units, copying the board onto wooden or material, tweaking the foundations and calling it “the monopoly sport.” When devotees taught mates how one can play, newcomers had no concept that the handmade sport was Magie’s invention.
Monopoly’s ties to Magie had been additional misplaced to historical past when Darrow bought his model, which integrated the names of areas within the thriving seashore resort of Atlantic Metropolis, N.J., to Parker Brothers in 1935, he claimed that he had invented it to entertain his household in the course of the Nice Despair. A plutocratic fantasy was precisely what People needed throughout that period. Hundreds of thousands of copies had been bought, saving a then-struggling Parker Brothers from chapter and making Darrow a wealthy man.
Many profitable video games, together with Tiddlywinks and Battleship, had been created as business variations of homespun diversions, but when a sport is within the public area, any writer can print their very own model.
Seeking to squash potential competitors and set up a Monopoly monopoly, Parker Brothers acquired comparable video games The Landlord’s Sport and spinoffs like Finance.
Magie bought the rights to The Landlord’s Sport to Parker Brothers for a flat $500, about $11,000 immediately; the agency additionally agreed to publish two of her different board video games, King’s Males, a tile-matching sport, and Cut price Day, a buying sport. Delighted that her Georgist concepts would attain a wider viewers, she wrote a letter to Parker Brothers wherein she addressed The Landlord’s Sport as if it had been an individual: “Farewell, my beloved brainchild. I regretfully half with you, however I’m supplying you with to a different who will be capable to do extra for you than I’ve completed.”
Though Parker Brothers, which Hasbro purchased in 1991, reprinted The Landlord’s Sport, it quickly fell out of print once more, eclipsed by Monopoly. Magie had no declare on royalties, and Parker Brothers promoted Darrow as Monopoly’s sole inventor.
Magie’s landmark contributions to American tradition and sport design had been expunged till the Nineteen Seventies, when Ralph Anspach, the inventor of a sport referred to as Anti-Monopoly, unearthed her work throughout a authorized battle over trademark infringement with Parker Brothers.
Magie died at 81 on March 2, 1948, in Staunton, Va., however she lived lengthy sufficient to see the enduring success of a sport primarily based on her personal invention, even when her title had been erased and her ideology toned down.
The Night Star newspaper of Washington, D.C., which had interviewed Magie in 1936, summarized her view: “If the delicate propaganda for the only tax thought works round to the minds of the 1000’s who now shake the cube and purchase and promote over the ‘Monopoly’ board, she feels the entire enterprise is not going to have been in useless.”
