Elizabeth Magie is often hailed as the uncredited inventor of Monopoly.
1935: The game of Monopoly was born - the brainchild of unemployed engineer Charles Darrow, though it owed much to
Elizabeth Magie's 1902 game The Landlord's Game, which she developed to show how rent-payers were impoverished by the landlord-tenant system.
Elizabeth Magie created the idea of the monopoly game.
It is derived from The Landlord's Game, which was created by
Elizabeth Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy which rewards wealth creation is better than one in which monopolists work under few constraints.
In 1903,
Elizabeth Magie, also known as Lizzie Magie, created the first version of Monopoly in Washington, D.C.
Philadelphia was where legend says businessman Charles Darrow dreamed up the iconic board game in 1933 (he didn't, he patented it - it was invented in 1903 by
Elizabeth Magie of Washington DC, but that's another story).
and Margaret MacGregor Magie, and his daughter, Mary
Elizabeth Magie.
It started in 1903 when
Elizabeth Magie invented a real estate game called "The Landlord's Game." Players bough "property" spaces and collected rent from other players.
He fills his narrative with fascinating characters, such as
Elizabeth Magie Phillips, creator of The Landlord's Game, who saw her invention as a way of winning folks over to the crank ideas of single-tax enthusiast Henry George; Columbia University economist Rexford GuyTugwell, who used Phillips' game as a teaching tool and who, as a member of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal "Brains Trust," pushed for "a full state-administered economy" during the Depression; and the unemployed plumber and "ordinary American" Charles B.
Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, showed what he called the MONOPOLY game to the executives at Parker Brothers." The italics are mine, and the game probably can be traced to
Elizabeth Magie Philips decades before, to be later developed as Atlantic City monopoly, a board game played by Quaker ladies and gentlemen in the Philadelphia area.
16 MONOPOLY: Invented in 1904 by
Elizabeth Magie as a piece of anti-capitalist propaganda.
Monopoly, for example, was patented in 1903 by
Elizabeth Magie, a Quaker who made up the game in protest against dishonest landlords.