Charles Darrow
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Charles Brace Darrow (August 10, 1889–August 29, 1967), was the first to patent the board game, Monopoly. Darrow was a domestic heater salesman from Germantown in southeastern Pennsylvania during the Great Depression.
After Darrow lost his job at a sales company following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, he tried to pitch his products at the Steel Pier of the popular tourist beach, Atlantic City.
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. He copied the idea of his neighbors, naming the locations on his Monopoly game from locations in and around Atlantic City.
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.
In 1934, Darrow showed his game to Parker Brothers. It was rejected unanimously for 52 "fundamental errors" and for reasons involving the game's length and complexity.
Charles Darrow then sold his sets of Monopoly at four dollars each, and, as demand for the sets increased, he patented the game in 1935 and then contracted a printing company from Philadelphia to print the Monopoly game boards on carton, and also the boxes for the sets.
Later, the company Parker Brothers reconsidered and acquitted the rights from Darrow to produce the game in large scale. Within a month, 20,000 sets of the game were being produced every weeek. "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 Charle B. Darrow and a credit to him appear on the Parker Brothers Stock Exchange game Bulls and Bears copyrighted in 1936 (but that game itself was considered a failure).
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 10-year suit that went all the way to the Supreme Court, 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, and which Todd had played with Quaker friends.
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.
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