This text is a part of Missed, a sequence of obituaries about outstanding individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Instances.
When Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman in Philadelphia, realized a few new board sport that was turning into in style, he requested his pals 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 commenced promoting it in toy shops and shops.
The sport, which concerned actual property buying and selling, would go on to promote greater than 275 million copies, has been licensed in tons of of spinoff editions and has turn out to be a part of the material of American life. It additionally made Darrow a millionaire. However credit score for the concept behind it shouldn’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, can 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 hire 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 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 had been shared equally, and one other the place the winner was the land baron who acquired essentially the most wealth. Both method, she hoped that gamers would take into consideration the underpinnings of capitalist society.
Elizabeth Jones Magie was born on Might 9, 1866, in Macomb, Unwell., to a political household. In line 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 numerous 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 brief story “The Theft of a Mind,” printed in Godey’s, a girls’s journal, was a few author who finds success after unlocking her potential underneath hypnosis solely to find that her hypnotist had plagiarized her novel.
Magie conceived of The Landlord’s Sport as an ideological device: a sport that will educate individuals concerning the ideas of the political economist Henry George. The central tenet of Georgism was that folks ought to hold all that they earned, however that the federal government ought 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 get rid of each lower-class poverty and industrial cartels.
Within the guidelines of The Landlord’s Sport, Magie defined how potential conflicts may very well 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 high-quality.”
The Landlord’s Sport wasn’t a blockbuster hit, however 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 underneath the identify “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 tooth” 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 girls, however 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 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 pals 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 seaside resort of Atlantic Metropolis, N.J., to Parker Brothers in 1935, he claimed that he had invented it to entertain his household through the Nice Melancholy. A plutocratic fantasy was precisely what People needed throughout that period. Thousands and 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 industrial variations of homespun diversions, but when a sport is within the public area, any writer can print its personal model.
Trying to squash potential competitors and set up a Monopoly monopoly, Parker Brothers acquired related 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 at present; 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 procuring 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 have the ability to do extra for you than I’ve carried out.”
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 based mostly on her personal invention, even when her identify 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 is not going to have been in useless.”
