Charles Darrow
| Charles Darrow | |
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| Born |
Charles Brace Darrow August 10, 1889 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | August 28, 1967 (aged 78) Bucks County, Pennsylvania |
Charles Brace Darrow (August 10, 1889 – August 28, 1967) was an American best known as the claimed inventor of the Monopoly board game (Elizabeth Magie was the original inventor of the game; Darrow's version was derivative). He became the first millionaire game-designer in history.
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 his version of Monopoly to Parker Brothers, claiming it to be his own invention, modern historians credit Darrow as just one of the game's final developers.
After losing his job at a sales company following the , Darrow worked at various odd jobs. Seeing his neighbors and acquaintances play a home-made board game in which the object was to buy and sell property, he decided to publish his own version of the game, with the help of his first son, William, and his wife Esther. Darrow marketed his version of the game under the name Monopoly.
In truth, Darrow was just one of many people in the American Midwest and East Coast who had been playing a game of buying and trading property. See history of the board game Monopoly. 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 traveled back east, where it had remained popular in Pennsylvania, and became popular with a group of Quakers in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Darrow was taught to play the game by Charles Todd, who had played it in Atlantic City, where it had been customized with that city's street and property names. Darrow's version of the game, as published, was virtually identical to the version he learned from Todd.
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