Lizzie Magie: The Woman Who Invented Monopoly and Got $500 for It
Updated: Oct 7
For decades the rules inside Monopoly boxes told the same story. An out-of-work salesman called Charles Darrow, stuck at home in the Depression, dreamed up a property game in his basement and became a millionaire. It was a lovely story. It was also untrue, and the company selling it had good reason to know that.
The game had been patented three decades earlier by a stenographer from Illinois called Elizabeth Magie, known to everyone as Lizzie. She designed it to show why landlords get rich and tenants don't. By the time it reached Darrow it had been passed from hand to hand for a generation, and what he sold was a copy of somebody else's copy.
Quick Answers
Who invented Monopoly? Lizzie Magie created its direct ancestor, The Landlord's Game, and patented it on 5 January 1904.
Did Charles Darrow invent Monopoly? No. He was taught a homemade version by friends in late 1932 and sold it as his own.
How much was Lizzie Magie paid? Parker Brothers bought her patent in November 1935 for $500, with no royalties.
Why did she make the game? To teach the ideas of the economist Henry George, who argued that land monopolies caused poverty.
How did the truth come out? An economics professor called Ralph Anspach dug it up while fighting a trademark lawsuit over his own game, Anti-Monopoly, in the 1970s.
Who made the British version? Waddingtons of Leeds, who swapped Atlantic City for London streets and launched it in 1936.
When did Lizzie Magie die? On 2 March 1948, aged 81, in Virginia. Almost nobody connected her with Monopoly at the time.
Who Was Lizzie Magie?
She was born in Macomb, Illinois, on 9 May 1866. Her father, James Magie, was a newspaper publisher and abolitionist who had travelled with Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He also handed his daughter a copy of Henry George's Progress and Poverty, the 1879 bestseller arguing that land should be taxed heavily because nobody had made it and everybody needed it. She never really put it down.
In the 1880s the family moved to the Washington area and Lizzie went to work as a stenographer and typist at the Dead Letter Office. She wrote poetry and short stories, did comic turns on stage and taught classes on George's single tax in the evenings. She also bought her own house, in Brentwood, Maryland, which was not a thing unmarried women on a typist's wage generally managed.
And she invented things. In 1893 she was granted a patent for a gadget that let paper feed more easily through a Hammond typewriter. At the time fewer than one in a hundred American patents went to women, which puts her in the same thin company as later inventors like Mary Kenner.
The Advert That Put a Woman Up for Sale
In 1906, a couple of years after patenting her game, Magie pulled a stunt that got her into newspapers across the country. She took out an advertisement offering herself for sale to the highest bidder as a "young woman American slave". The ad described her as not beautiful but very attractive, with features full of character.
She was earning about $10 a week as a stenographer and her point was that a woman's only real route to security was to be bought by a husband. Asked to explain herself, she told reporters, "We are not machines". It was the same instinct for a headline that had sent Nellie Bly into an asylum twenty years earlier, and it worked just as well.
How Do You Play The Landlord's Game?
Magie filed her patent in 1903 and it was granted on 5 January 1904, as US Patent 748,626. She was 37. In a Georgist magazine she called the game "a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing".
Anyone who has played Monopoly would recognise the board straight away. It's a square circuit with nine spaces along each side. There are four railroads, two utilities, properties to buy and rent out, a jail, a Go to Jail corner and a Public Park where the free parking would later go. Players collected wages each time they passed the starting corner, which she labelled "Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages". Land on Lord Blueblood's estate and you were sent to jail for trespassing.
The clever part was that she ended up with two sets of rules for the same board. Under the monopolist rules you played to bankrupt everyone else. Under the Prosperity rules, rent went into a common pot as a land tax and the game was won when the poorest player had doubled their money. Play both, she reckoned, and you'd feel the difference.
If you fancy trying it, you don't need an antique set. Hasbro has since put a version of her alternative rules online, so the idea can be tried on an ordinary Monopoly board: rents go into a shared pot instead of to each other and you stop when the poorest player has twice what they started with. It makes for a gentler evening.
She moved to Chicago in 1906 and set up the Economic Game Company with friends to publish it. In 1910 she offered it to Parker Brothers, who turned it down. A British edition came out in 1913 under the title Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit and sold badly. She married a businessman called Albert Phillips in 1910 and patented an updated version in 1924, with squares like Easy Street and Rickety Row.
How the Game Spread Without Her
What Magie couldn't control was what happened once people started making their own. The game was easy to copy with a bit of oilcloth and some crayons, and that's exactly what happened.
It caught on at Arden, a single tax colony in Delaware where she was a regular visitor. One resident, the economist Scott Nearing, took it into his lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. From there it went from campus to campus. A federal appeals court later found it was being played in the early 1920s at Princeton, MIT, Smith, Penn and Haverford, always on homemade boards and usually just called the monopoly game. Somewhere along the way the Prosperity rules dropped off.
Then a woman called Ruth Hoskins, who'd learned it in Indianapolis, took it with her to Atlantic City, where a circle of Quaker players renamed the squares after local streets. That's where Boardwalk, Park Place and Baltic Avenue come from.
Charles Darrow and the Dinner Party
One of the people who learned the Atlantic City version was Charles Todd of Germantown, Philadelphia. Late in 1932 he taught it to an old schoolfriend, Esther Jones, and her husband. The husband was Charles Darrow, an out-of-work heating salesman. This was the pit of the Depression, the America Dorothea Lange was photographing.
Darrow loved it and asked for the rules in writing. Todd had his secretary type them up. The Todds' board had a spelling mistake on it, "Marvin Gardens" for the real Marven Gardens, and that mistake is still on the board today. It's about the neatest proof there is of where Darrow got it.
He had a cartoonist friend, F.O. Alexander, smarten up the artwork, copyrighted the result in 1933 and began selling sets through a Philadelphia department store. Parker Brothers passed on it in 1934, changed their minds when it kept selling and bought it in 1935. They shifted 278,000 copies that first year and 1,751,000 the next. Darrow became the first person to make a million from a board game.
What Parker Brothers Paid Lizzie Magie
Parker Brothers had a problem, and they knew it. Their own president, Robert Barton, later admitted under oath that he hadn't believed Darrow's story. And Magie's 1924 patent was still in force.
So in November 1935 the company's founder, George Parker, went to see her at home in Virginia. He came away with the patent for $500 and no royalties. As part of the deal Parker Brothers agreed to publish The Landlord's Game and two of her other designs. They did, in small numbers and with next to no advertising, and let them fade.
It's worth being fair about why she signed. Magie wasn't chasing money. She wanted George's ideas in front of as many people as possible and one of America's biggest games companies was offering to do it. She refused to let them change a thing about her game. Barton remembered her as "a rabid Henry George single tax advocate". He didn't mean it kindly, but she'd probably have taken it as a compliment.
It's a familiar shape. A woman invents something, a man with better connections sells it and the credit follows the money. Faith Bacon watched the same thing happen with the fan dance in the very same years. The opposite case is rarer, though it does exist: Jonas Salk gave his vaccine away on purpose.
How Monopoly Got to Britain
The version most British readers grew up with arrived within months. In December 1935 Parker Brothers posted a set to Waddingtons, a printing firm in Leeds. The managing director, Victor Watson, handed it to his son Norman, who played it all weekend and told his father to buy it. The deal was done over a transatlantic phone call.
Watson then took his secretary, Marjory Phillips, down to London for the day to pick the streets. The story goes that they stopped for lunch at the Angel in Islington, which is why a pub ended up on a board otherwise made of roads. The London edition went on sale in 1936, billed as "the game that has taken America by storm".
So Old Kent Road and Mayfair are stand-ins for Baltic Avenue and Boardwalk, which were themselves pencilled in by Quakers over whatever Lizzie Magie had written there first. During the war the same Leeds factory hid maps, compasses and real money inside Monopoly sets sent to British prisoners of war.
Did Lizzie Magie Ever Get the Credit?
Not while she was alive. Once Monopoly was everywhere and Darrow was being written up as its inventor, she went to the papers. On 28 January 1936 the Washington Evening Star ran a piece on her, photographed holding up her own boards. It worked out that once you counted lawyers, printers and Patent Office fees, the game had probably cost her more than it ever made.
Nothing came of it. Her husband died in 1937. When the census taker called in 1940 she gave her occupation as "maker of games" and her income as nothing. She died on 2 March 1948, aged 81, and was buried beside Albert at Columbia Gardens Cemetery in Arlington. They had no children, and almost nobody connected her with the most popular board game in the country.
Ralph Anspach and the 40,000 Buried Games
The story stayed buried for another quarter of a century, and it took a lawsuit to dig it up.
In 1973 Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at San Francisco State University, brought out a game called Anti-Monopoly. Parker Brothers, by then owned by General Mills, came after him for trademark infringement. Anspach's defence was that "monopoly" had been the common name of a folk game long before Parker Brothers owned it, and to prove that he had to find the people who'd played it. He tracked down the Todds, the Atlantic City Quakers and boards that were older than Darrow's. Then he found Magie's patents.
It went badly at first. A federal judge ruled against him and ordered his stock destroyed. On 5 July 1977 about 40,000 copies of Anti-Monopoly were crushed under a bulldozer and buried in a landfill outside Mankato, Minnesota, where the game was made.
Anspach appealed. In 1982 the Ninth Circuit found that the Monopoly trademark had become generic and, along the way, set out the game's real history in a court judgment: Magie's patents, the college boards, Darrow being taught the game and passing it off as his invention. The Supreme Court declined to hear Parker Brothers' appeal the following year. Anspach had also turned down a settlement, because it would have required him to keep what he'd found to himself.
He did go back to Mankato. In January 1980, with one ruling already gone his way, he and the game's manufacturer returned to the landfill to rescue a few copies as souvenirs. A report of the trip recorded the result: "Six hours of digging in near zero cold failed to turn up any". As far as anyone knows, they're still down there.
What Does Hasbro Say About Lizzie Magie Now?
Hasbro owns Monopoly today, and its record on Magie is mixed. For years the official history began with Darrow. That's changed, up to a point.
In September 2019 the company announced Ms. Monopoly, an edition built around women inventors in which female players start with $1,900 to the men's $1,500 and collect $240 for passing Go instead of $200. The obvious question was why a game celebrating women inventors had so little to say about the one who invented the game. Mary Pilon was among those who asked it. Hasbro's answer was that Magie did get a mention, in the leaflet inside the box, as a pioneer of "land-grabbing games".
That's more than she got in 1935. It still isn't her name on the lid.
What Lizzie Magie Left Behind
The odd thing about Monopoly is that it still does what Magie built it to do. It's a game where one player ends up owning everything and everybody else goes broke, and most people come away from it slightly annoyed. She'd have said that was the point. What got lost was the second set of rules, the one that showed there was another way to play.
Her name is on the record now, thanks largely to Anspach and to Mary Pilon's 2015 book The Monopolists. It took the best part of a century, and it cost her everything but $500.
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Sources
Smithsonian Lemelson Center: The Woman Inventor Behind Monopoly
British Library: Lizzie Magie and the history of Monopoly
Smithsonian Magazine: Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% About Income Inequality, Mary Pilon, January 2015
History.com: Who Really Invented Monopoly?
NPR: Interview with Mary Pilon, author of The Monopolists, 3 March 2015
Truth or Fiction: The Landlord's Game and Monopoly's Origins
Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County: From Macomb to Boardwalk
Arlington Historical Society: The Landlord's Game
Landreform.org: The Monopoly Game's Georgist History
US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit: Anti-Monopoly, Inc. v. General Mills Fun Group, Inc., 1982
Anspach Archives: Collection documenting the true history of Monopoly
South Leeds Life: Local History: John Waddington
Newsweek: Not Everyone Is Amused by Hasbro's New Ms. Monopoly Game, 10 September 2019
The Philadelphia Inquirer: Ms. Monopoly celebrates female trailblazers, except the one who created Monopoly, 11 September 2019
Star Tribune: Why thousands of board games are buried beneath Mankato
