Charles Darrow
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Charles Brace Darrow (August 10, 1889–August 29, 1967), has been credited, erroneously, as having invented the board game Monopoly. Darrow was a domestic heater salesman from Germantown, a neighborhood in Philadelphia (the part of Germantown he lived in is now called "Mount Airy") during the Great Depression. The house he lived in still stands at 40 Westview Street. While Darrow eventually sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers, claiming it to be his own invention, modern historians treat Darrow as one of the game's final "developers".[1][2]
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[edit] Biography
After Darrow lost his job at a sales company following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, he took various odd jobs in attempts at having an income. Darrow saw his neighbors and acquaintances play a home-made board game in which the object was to buy and sell property, so he got the idea to make one of those games by himself, with the help of his first son, William, and of his wife.
In truth, Darrow became one of the many people in the American Midwest and East Coast who had been playing a game of buying and trading property. The game's direct ancestor was "The Landlord's Game", created by Elizabeth Magie. The game was used by college professors and their students, and another variant, called "The Fascinating Game of Finance" was published in the Midwest in the late 1920s and early 1930s. From there the game travelled back east, where it had remained popular in Pennsylvania, and became popular with a group of Quakers in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Charles Todd learned the game in Atlantic City, where it had been customized with that city's street and property names, and taught it to Charles Darrow.
The Darrow family initially made their game sets on flexible, round pieces of oilcloth instead of rigid, square carton. Charles drew the designs of the properties with drafting pens, and his son and wife filled in the spaces with colors and made the title deed cards and chance and community-chest cards. On these first round boards, Darrow included some of the icons (actually designed for him by a hired graphic artist) that the later Monopoly made famous, such as the large red arrow for "Go", the black locomotives on the railroad spaces, the faucet on "Water Works" and lightbulb on "Electric Company" and the question marks on the "Chance" spaces. Darrow then secured a copyright for the game in 1933.
[edit] Commercial sales
By 1934, Darrow started having the game printed on cardboard, and sold copies in long white boxes to Wanamaker's Department Store in Philadelphia. Later that year, Darrow showed his game first to Milton Bradley and later to Parker Brothers. The latter company rejected the game for 52 "fundamental errors" which included the game's length and complexity.
Darrow reinvested money from the sales into smaller sets, sold in black cardboard boxes, with boards sold separately from the sets. After Darrow started to take orders from other Philadelphia department stores, Parker Brothers reconsidered.
Parker Brothers negotiated the rights from Darrow to produce the game in large scale. Darrow sought and received U.S. Patent 2026082 on the game in 1935, which Parker Brothers acquired. Within a year, 20,000 sets of the game were being produced every week. "Monopoly" ended up being the best selling board game in America that year, and it made Darrow the first millionaire game designer in history.
A posed photograph of Charles B. Darrow and a credit to him appear on the Parker Brothers Stock Exchange game "Bulls and Bears," copyrighted in 1936 (but the game was not actually designed by Darrow and that game was considered a failure).
Darrow was later promoted as the sole inventor of the game, though later research has shown that Magie, Ruth Hoskins, Louis and Ferdinand Thun and Daniel Layman, among others, all played roles in the game's ultimate development. Despite this, current owners Hasbro only list Charles Darrow by name on their official website.
[edit] After death
Three years after Darrow's death in 1967, Atlantic City placed a commemorative plaque in his honor on the boardwalk, near the corner of Park Place.
In 1973, a San Francisco State University economics professor named Ralph Anspach produced Anti-Monopoly, a game similar to Monopoly, and for this was sued by Parker Brothers. In a ten year suit that went all the way to the Supreme Court (which ultimately decided not to hear the case), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that Darrow had copied down the rules directly (even the misspelling of Marven Gardens) from the game produced by Charles Todd.
[edit] References
- ^ Walsh, Tim (2004). The Playmakers: Amazing Origins of Timeless Toys. Keys Publishing, Page 45. ISBN 0-9646973-4-3.
- ^ Axelrod, Alan (2002). Everything I Know about Business I Learned from Monopoly. Running Press, Page 18. ISBN 0-7624-1327-1.
[edit] External links
- Article covering court battle over Monopoly
- Early history of Monopoly
- "From Berks to Boardwalk" – A look at the influence that residents of Berks County, Pennsylvania had on the early development of the game that became Monopoly.
