EGN NEWS DESK
This article is a part of Overlooked, a sequence of obituaries about outstanding folks whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
When Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman in Philadelphia, discovered a few new board recreation that was turning into well-liked, he requested his pals to kind up the principles 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 recreation, which concerned actual property buying and selling, would go on to promote greater than 275 million copies, has been licensed in lots of of spinoff editions and has grow to be a part of the material of American life. It additionally made Darrow a millionaire. But credit score for the thought behind it shouldn’t have been his. Rather, 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 recreation, initially referred to as The Landlord’s Game, could be acquainted to anybody who has performed Monopoly: People transfer their tokens across the perimeter of a sq. board, shopping for actual property alongside the best way, 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 revealed in 1906 by way of the Economic Game Company, of which she was an proprietor.
In her patent utility, Magie wrote, “Each time a participant goes across the board he’s imagined to have carried out a lot labor upon Mother 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 have been shared equally, and one other the place the winner was the land baron who acquired essentially the most wealth. Either manner, she hoped that gamers would take into consideration the underpinnings of capitalist society.
Elizabeth Jones Magie was born on May 9, 1866, in Macomb, Ill., to a political household. According to Mary Pilon’s 2015 ebook, “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 Dead Letter Office, the place mail thought-about undeliverable landed; a comedic stage actress; an engineer who invented and patented a tool that improved the circulate of paper in typewriters; and a fiction author. Her quick story “The Theft of a Brain,” revealed 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 Game as an ideological instrument: a recreation that may educate folks concerning the rules of the political economist Henry George. The central tenet of Georgism was that individuals ought to preserve all that they earned, however that the federal government needs 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.
In the principles of The Landlord’s Game, Magie defined how potential conflicts could possibly be resolved: “Should any emergency come up which isn’t lined by the principles of the sport, the gamers should settle the matter between themselves; but when a participant completely refuses to obey the principles as above set forth he should go to jail and stay there till he throws a double or pays his positive.”
The Landlord’s Game wasn’t a blockbuster hit, but it surely developed pockets of followers, together with utopian Quakers in Delaware and fraternity brothers at Williams College 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 12 months, she additionally tried to promote them The Landlord’s Game, 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 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 “sincere, simply, poetical, philosophical.”
The advert was meant to be a commentary on slavery and the awful financial prospects of single ladies, but it surely as an alternative 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.
In the meantime, gamers have been changing The Landlord’s Game into home made units, copying the board onto wooden or fabric, tweaking the principles and calling it “the monopoly recreation.” When devotees taught pals tips on how to play, newcomers had no concept that the handmade recreation was Magie’s invention.
Monopoly’s ties to Magie have been additional misplaced to historical past when Darrow bought his model, which integrated the names of areas within the thriving seaside resort of Atlantic City, N.J., to Parker Brothers in 1935, he claimed that he had invented it to entertain his household in the course of the Great Depression. A plutocratic fantasy was precisely what Americans needed throughout that period. Millions of copies have 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, have been created as business variations of homespun diversions, but when a recreation is within the public area, any writer can print its personal model.
Looking to squash potential competitors and set up a Monopoly monopoly, Parker Brothers acquired comparable video games The Landlord’s Game and spinoffs like Finance.
Magie bought the rights to The Landlord’s Game to Parker Brothers for a flat $500, about $11,000 at the moment; the agency additionally agreed to publish two of her different board video games, King’s Men, a tile-matching recreation, and Bargain Day, a procuring recreation. Delighted that her Georgist concepts would attain a wider viewers, she wrote a letter to Parker Brothers through which she addressed The Landlord’s Game 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 performed.”
Although Parker Brothers, which Hasbro purchased in 1991, reprinted The Landlord’s Game, 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 recreation design have been expunged till the Seventies, when Ralph Anspach, the inventor of a recreation 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 recreation based mostly on her personal invention, even when her title had been erased and her ideology toned down.
The Evening Star newspaper of Washington, D.C., which had interviewed Magie in 1936, summarized her view: “If the delicate propaganda for the only tax concept 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.”
