Frontispiece · My Betrothed, and Other Poems · 1892
Lizzie Magie
1866 — 1948
She built a board game to show how landlords win and everyone else goes broke. The world learned to play it as Monopoly.
On January 5, 1904, the U.S. Patent Office granted patent No. 748,626 to a Washington stenographer for a board game. Its track ran around all four sides of a square and never ended: there was no finish line, only rent, railroads, a corner marked “Go to Jail,” and a steady flow of money from the players who owned nothing to the ones who owned the land. Lizzie Magie called it The Landlord’s Game. It was meant as a warning.
She was a follower of the economist Henry George and wanted children to feel for themselves how land monopoly worked. For thirty years people copied the game by hand. Students played it on college campuses and Quakers played it in Atlantic City, where the streets on the board got their names. Then in 1935 Parker Brothers sold it as Monopoly and credited it to a man named Charles Darrow. They paid Magie $500 for her patent. For decades afterwards, hardly anyone knew her name.
A life in play
The lifeline
1866
Born May 9 in Macomb, Illinois, to an abolitionist newspaper publisher
1893
At 26, patents a device that feeds paper of different sizes through a typewriter
1904
Granted a patent for The Landlord’s Game, a board with a track that loops forever
1924
Sept 23: a second patent for the game is issued, 102 years ago today
1935
Sells the patent to Parker Brothers for $500, with no royalties
1948
Dies March 2 in Arlington, Virginia, at 81, with no credit for the game
By the numbers
The measure of her
$500
What Parker Brothers paid her for the patent in 1935, with no royalties
31 yrs
From her 1904 patent to the 1935 Monopoly patent in Darrow’s name
$0
Her income on the 1940 census, where her occupation was “maker of games”
1973
The year a lawsuit brought her patents to light, 25 years after her death
What she made
The work
1893
A typewriter improvement (U.S. patent 498,129): a way to feed paper of different sizes through the machine. She was 26.
1904
The Landlord’s Game (U.S. patent 748,626): a square board with nine spaces along each side, and corners marked “Go to Jail” and “Public Park.” It had two sets of rules. Under the monopolist rules, players tried to crush each other. Under the anti-monopolist rules, everyone was rewarded when wealth was created.
1906
The Economic Game Company, set up with other followers of Henry George to publish the game themselves. The same year, she moved to Chicago.
1910
Mock Trial, a comic card game, published by Parker Brothers. They turned down The Landlord’s Game as too complicated.
1924
A second patent (No. 1,509,312), issued September 23. Her first had expired in 1921, and she was trying to regain control of a game that strangers were copying by hand. 102 yrs today
1937
Bargain Day and King’s Men, both published by Parker Brothers after she complained publicly about Monopoly. Neither one sold like Monopoly.
Erased, then restored
Recognition
In her lifetime
Paid $500 for her patent, with no royalties, while Monopoly became a bestseller
Charles Darrow was given the credit and the 1935 patent, and became a millionaire
She objected in the Washington papers in 1936, but the Darrow story stuck
Recorded on the 1940 census as a “maker of games” with an income of zero
Today
Economist Ralph Anspach found her patents in 1973 while Parker Brothers was trying to stop his game Anti-Monopoly
Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists (2015) told her story to a wide audience
The subject of PBS American Experience’s Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History (2023)
Called “America’s First Lady of Games” in the Board Game Studies Journal (2019)
The place that made her
Washington, D.C.
Her family moved east in the early 1880s. In Washington she worked as a stenographer and typist at the Dead Letter Office, wrote poems and stories, and acted on stage. She first shared her game with friends in nearby Brentwood, Maryland. She also filed her patents in Washington, and in 1936 she held up her original board for the city’s newspapers to show that Monopoly came from her game.
$10 /wk
Her pay as a stenographer. It was not enough to live on alone.
748,626
The number of her game patent, granted by the Patent Office on January 5, 1904
1936
The year she told the Evening Star and the Washington Post that the game was hers
“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.”
— Lizzie Magie, 1906
