This text is a part of Missed, a sequence of obituaries about exceptional individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Occasions.
When Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman in Philadelphia, realized a few new board sport that was turning into well-liked in small circles, he requested his pals to sort up the foundations and assist him jazz up the graphic design. In 1933, he copyrighted the sport, Monopoly, as his personal invention and commenced promoting it in toy shops and shops.
The actual-estate buying and selling sport would go on to promote greater than 275 million copies, has been licensed in a whole bunch 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 thought behind it shouldn’t have been his. Somewhat, it belonged to a lady 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 known as The Landlord’s Sport, can be acquainted to anybody who has performed Monopoly: Individuals transfer their tokens across the perimeter of a sq. board, shopping for actual property alongside the best way, 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, a enterprise she co-owned.
In her patent utility, Magie wrote, “Every time a participant goes across the board he’s presupposed 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 assets have 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, Sick., to a political household. In keeping with 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 move of paper in typewriters; and a fiction author. Her quick story “The Theft of a Mind,” printed in Godey’s, a ladies’s journal, was a few 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 instrument: a sport that will train individuals in regards to the ideas of the political economist Henry George. The central tenet of Georgism was that folks ought to maintain all that they earned, however that the federal government needs to be funded by a tax on actual property house owners, since land rightly belonged to everybody. A society funded by a single land tax, George believed, would remove 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 lined 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 tremendous.”
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 Faculty 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 made a number of card video games, together with a role-playing one known as Mock Trial, which she offered 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 obtained 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 girl American slave,” with “giant gray-green eyes, full, passionate lips; splendid enamel: not lovely, however very engaging,” and describing herself as “trustworthy, simply; poetical, philosophical.”
The advert was meant to be a commentary on slavery and the grim financial prospects of single ladies, nevertheless it as a substitute led to undesirable marriage proposals and a proposal of employment with a freak present. (Magie in the end 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 have been changing The Landlord’s Sport into home made units, copying the board onto wooden or material, tweaking the foundations and calling it “the monopoly sport.” When devotees taught pals learn how to play, newcomers had no concept that the handmade sport was Magie’s invention.
Monopoly’s ties to Magie have been additional misplaced to historical past when Darrow offered his model to Parker Brothers in 1935, claiming that he had invented it to entertain his household in the course of the Nice Despair and that he had given its properties the names of places within the thriving seashore resort of Atlantic Metropolis. A plutocratic fantasy was precisely what People wished throughout that period. Tens of millions of copies have been offered, saving a then-struggling Parker Brothers from chapter and making Darrow a wealthy man.
Many profitable video games, together with Tiddlywinks and Battleship, have been created as industrial variations of homespun diversions, but when a sport is within the public area, any writer can print their very own model.
Trying 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 offered the rights to The Landlord’s Sport to Parker Brothers for a flat $500, about $11,000 as we speak; 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 during which she addressed The Landlord’s Sport as if it have been an individual: “Farewell, my beloved brainchild. I regretfully half with you, however I’m providing you with to a different who will be capable to do extra for you than I’ve finished.”
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 have been expunged till the Nineteen Seventies, when Ralph Anspach, the inventor of a sport known 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 refined propaganda for the only tax concept works round to the minds of the hundreds who now shake the cube and purchase and promote over the ‘Monopoly’ board, she feels the entire enterprise won’t have been in useless.”
