You've heard that story about how Charles Darrow, an unemployed family man in the depths of the Great Depression, invented the game Monopoly to entertain his friends and family. Turns out, that story is hogwash. Mary Pilon with
Smithsonian found the truth.
Monopoly's story began decades earlier, with an all-but-forgotten woman named Lizzie Magie, an artist, writer, feminist and inventor.
Magie worked as a stenographer and typist at the Dead Letter Office in Washington, D.C., a repository for the nation’s lost mail. But she also appeared in plays, and wrote poetry and short stories. In 1893, she patented a gadget that fed different-sized papers through a typewriter and allowed more type on a single page. And in 1904, Magie received a patent for an invention she called the Landlord’s Game, a square board with nine rectangular spaces on each side, set between corners labeled "Go to Jail" and "Public Park." Players circled the board buying up railroads, collecting money and paying rent. She made up two sets of rules, "monopolist" and "anti-monopolist," but her stated goal was to demonstrate the evils of accruing vast sums of wealth at the expense of others. A firebrand against the railroad, steel and oil monopolists of her time, she told a reporter in 1906, "In a short time, I hope a very short time, men and women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller, maybe, have more than they know what to do with."
Magie's Landlord's Game was picked up and sold by a publisher in New York, but quickly became the basis for a bunch of homemade versions. One of those versions was copied by Darrow, who sold it to Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers also bought the copyright from Magie for $500, who was happy that her game—which she considered a teaching tool about the problem of income inequality—would reach a wider audience.
But, as usual, the man took—and got—all the credit, and the populist roots of the game were lost. Now the whole point of the game is to try to force the other guy into bankruptcy, while amassing as much of the bank as you can.