Do NOT Pass GO! (Classic)

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Speaker 4 Happy New Year!

Speaker 23 Did you pull out a board game over the holiday season?

Speaker 25 Did you play nicely?

Speaker 27 Or did it quickly descend into acrimony, name-calling and accusations of cheating?

Speaker 28 The game that seems to bring out the killer instinct in even the kindest of grannies is Monopoly.

Speaker 31 The cutthroat activity sees players try to amass fortunes while gleefully making opponents bankrupt.

Speaker 33 But it wasn't meant to be like that.

Speaker 36 It may surprise you to know that the inventor of the game imagined a far gentler, kinder pastime.

Speaker 9 But as I learned researching the history of Monopoly, her ideals and her name were squeezed out of the origin story.

Speaker 42 So, take a break from your own gaming to listen again to a classic cautionary tale featuring the voice talent of Helena Bonham Carter as the inimitable Lizzie McGee.

Speaker 41 Whatever you do, do not pass go.

Speaker 4 In September 2019, the toy and game giant Hasbro struck a blow in the battle over women's rights.

Speaker 48 Although it's not quite clear which side they were on, they published Ms.

Speaker 51 Monopoly, putting a new spin on their classic board game.

Speaker 53 The tagline for this new version was, The first game where women make more than men.

Speaker 55 They're not kidding.

Speaker 49 Female players start the game with more Monopoly money than male players, and they get $240 each time they pass Go, rather than the traditional $200 for the boys.

Speaker 55 Why exactly?

Speaker 38 It's not clear.

Speaker 25 Some sort of joke?

Speaker 45 It wasn't even a consistent joke.

Speaker 55 Some of the chance and community chest cards paid out more cash to male players.

Speaker 45 So what is the message?

Speaker 35 Women have been unfairly treated?

Speaker 27 Women need help to win?

Speaker 24 We don't actually know what feminism means?

Speaker 28 There is, however, one feature of the game that's hard to criticize.

Speaker 4 Instead of buying properties from around Atlantic City as in the classic game, players invest in inventions that were developed by women, such as Marion Donovan, the inventor of the leak-proof diaper, Anna Connolly, the inventor of the external fire escape, and Hedi Lamar, the film star who in the 1940s co-invented frequency hopping radio transmissions, a precursor to today's Wi-Fi.

Speaker 63 In Ms.

Speaker 64 Monopoly, each square represents one of these inventions.

Speaker 55 For example, instead of buying the prestige property Boardwalk, you could invest in chocolate chip cookies, invented by Ruth Wakefield.

Speaker 18 And it's hard to argue with the sentiments expressed in Hasbro's advertisement for Ms. Monopoly, which begins with the simple text,

Speaker 43 Women hold just 10%

Speaker 35 of all patented inventions.

Speaker 18 The Ms. Monopoly game was widely derided as a confusing mass of mixed messages, but the Ms.

Speaker 25 Monopoly advert asks a simple, powerful question.

Speaker 32 Isn't it time that the inventiveness of women was finally acknowledged and rewarded?

Speaker 15 Well, isn't it?

Speaker 33 I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

Speaker 1 You may be familiar with the traditional story about the origins of Monopoly.

Speaker 31 I remember reading it myself as a child, which isn't surprising, since the story itself was, for decades, included in every game box. The story goes as follows.

Speaker 12 In 1933, the bleakest depths of the Great Depression, an unemployed steam radiator repairman from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow was struck with an idea to create a new board game about property trading.

Speaker 67 It was an act of desperation.

Speaker 26 because Darrow had no money and a family to feed.

Speaker 35 But it was also an act act of inspiration, since the game sprang fully formed from the brow of its creator.

Speaker 4 Darrow drew out the game board on a sheet of oilcloth.

Speaker 18 The board featured the familiar street names of Atlantic City, where Darrow once enjoyed taking his wife and children on vacation.

Speaker 39 It was a nostalgic decision.

Speaker 43 aimed at cheering up a family that had fallen on hard times.

Speaker 15 The Darrows loved the game.

Speaker 51 Suspecting that he'd created something valuable, Charles Darrow tried to interest the big board game distributors.

Speaker 47 Milton Bradley turned him down.

Speaker 25 So did Parker Brothers.

Speaker 13 However, they later reconsidered when they saw how popular Darrow's homemade sets were.

Speaker 70 With the backing of Parker Brothers, Monopoly became a smash hit.

Speaker 64 Charles Darrow's fortune was assured, as was his reputation as the creator of one of the most successful games in the world.

Speaker 52 But as the journalist and historian Mary Polon says in her book The Monopolists, the story wasn't exactly true.

Speaker 4 That's putting it kindly, because as Polon's book makes perfectly clear, the story I read in my game box isn't true at all.

Speaker 48 The game of monopoly did not come to Charles Darrow in a flash of inspiration.

Speaker 15 It was taught to him by his friends, Charles and Olive Todd, in 1932.

Speaker 30 The Todds played on a board with Go,

Speaker 4 Jail,

Speaker 74 Free Parking and Go to Jail at the Four Corners, with Chance and Community Chest, with the Electric Company and the Waterworks and street names from around Atlantic City.

Speaker 43 When drawing up his Monopoly board, Charles Todd even made a mistake in the spelling of Marvin Gardens, swapping in an I to become Marvin Gardens.

Speaker 17 Charles Darrow's Monopoly Board would later use not only the same squares in the same configuration, with the same deed values, it would even repeat the same spelling error.

Speaker 76 After several evenings pleasantly whiled away with the game,

Speaker 77 Say, Todd, would you mind lending me a copy of the rules of that game?

Speaker 22 Well, Darrow, I don't know.

Speaker 3 I've never written them down.

Speaker 16 Why do you want them?

Speaker 77 I'd love to teach it to others. I want to make sure I get it right.

Speaker 26 Charles Todd was a little puzzled, but he obliged his friend.

Speaker 49 Soon after, to Todd's irritation, Darrow started avoiding him.

Speaker 5 He'd crossed the street when the Todds were coming the other way.

Speaker 4 Then...

Speaker 62 came the blockbuster success of Monopoly, with sparky graphics that Charles Darrow had begged free of charge from another friend, the cartoonist Franklin Alexander.

Speaker 18 Journalists repeated the rags to riches yarn that Darrow was spinning.

Speaker 15 Darrow's former friends, Charles and Olive Todd, were outraged.

Speaker 23 But not because they felt their idea had been stolen.

Speaker 4 They knew all along that Monopoly had never belonged to them in the first place.

Speaker 45 They had been taught the game by their friends, the brothers Jesse and Eugene Rayford.

Speaker 50 Jesse and Eugene had been the ones who named squares on the board after areas in Atlantic City.

Speaker 17 But they hadn't invented Monopoly either.

Speaker 18 They'd adapted a version they'd been taught by Ruth Hoskins, who was a trainee schoolteacher.

Speaker 17 So did Ruth Hoskins invent the game?

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 74 It was circulating widely in the 1920s.

Speaker 56 It was even popular in economics departments.

Speaker 25 One influential player, Scott Nearing, was a socialist economics professor at the Wharton School, who used a version of the game to teach the evils of corporate monopolies.

Speaker 31 This game was called Monopoly, and the squareboard had plenty of recognisable elements, with 40 spaces, including chance, jail, go-to-jail, and numerous properties.

Speaker 64 But there were two ways to play the game.

Speaker 56 It could be played competitively, as players tried to monopolise groups of property and bankrupt their opponents.

Speaker 53 Or it could be played cooperatively, with resources paid into the public purse, utilities supplying services for free, and each player's resources growing over time.

Speaker 30 The cooperative game was, of course,

Speaker 62 very dull.

Speaker 29 But monopoly wasn't invented at the Wharton School.

Speaker 28 Professor Scott Nearing learned it in the utopian community called Arden in Delaware.

Speaker 80 Arden had been founded in 1900 and organised according to the principles of the economist, journalist and social reformer Henry George.

Speaker 26 Henry George's most famous idea was that all land and natural resources ultimately belonged to society as a whole, so whoever owned them should be paying a hefty tax.

Speaker 78 And it was Henry George's idea of this single tax that the Arden version of Monopoly was designed to explore.

Speaker 56 This game, the progressive heaven or capitalist hell version of Monopoly, was called the Landlord's Game.

Speaker 32 Did the radical folk of Arden invent the Landlord's game?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 It was dreamed up by a remarkable woman named Lizzie Magee.

Speaker 78 And is Lizzie McGee celebrated on the Ms.

Speaker 50 Monopoly board?

Speaker 33 I think you can guess the answer to that question.

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Speaker 6 Cautionary Tales is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance.

Speaker 7 They say that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.

Speaker 10 When you go with Amica, you are getting coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, so they'll help look after what's important to you together.

Speaker 8 Auto, home, life, and more, Amika has you covered.

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Speaker 18 Visit amica.com and get a quote today.

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Speaker 56 Unlike Charles Darrow, the man who claimed to have invented Monopoly, Lizzie Magee was a true original.

Speaker 25 I'm thankful that I was taught how to think and not what to think.

Speaker 71 When McGee created the original Monopoly-style game, it was the early 1900s.

Speaker 78 Here's how Mary Plon's History of Monopoly describes Magee.

Speaker 46 A distinctive-looking woman in her 30s.

Speaker 42 With curly dark locks and bangs that framed her face, Lizzy had inherited the bushy eyebrows of her father.

Speaker 75 The descendant of Scottish immigrants, she had pale skin, a strong jawline, and a strong work ethic.

Speaker 38 Quite, as an unmarried woman, unusual at her age, working as a stenographer, she had little prospect of acquiring material comforts, yet, She had saved and bought herself a home and a substantial parcel of land near Washington, D.C.

Speaker 18 Lizzie's father had been a journalist and campaigner, the editor of an abolitionist newspaper and a devoted supporter of Abraham Lincoln.

Speaker 31 She too was politically active.

Speaker 24 Like the community at Arden, Lizzie Magee was a Georgist, a committed follower of the ideas and ideals of Henry George.

Speaker 40 She was friends with Henry George Jr., the son of the great man himself, and she was the secretary of the Georgist organisation, the Woman's Single Tax Club of Washington.

Speaker 18 Henry George had died, suddenly, in 1897, while running to be the mayor of New York City.

Speaker 75 A hundred thousand people lined up to pay their respects to his funeral casket.

Speaker 17 His followers, including Lizzie McGee, had felt bereft.

Speaker 72 and determined to carry on the fight for Georgist policies.

Speaker 71 But what could Magee do?

Speaker 66 A progressive in a a capitalist world, a woman in a man's world, she was desperate for social change, but felt frustrated in what she could achieve.

Speaker 52 Mary Poland's description of her conjures a powerhouse of creativity.

Speaker 40 McGee wrote poems about unrequited love.

Speaker 55 She wrote essays on Georgist taxation.

Speaker 82 She wrote stories, too, including one, The Theft of a Brain.

Speaker 63 about a young woman whose brilliant idea is plagiarised.

Speaker 63 But none of these creative projects really broke through.

Speaker 9 McGee was frustrated.

Speaker 49 How to get the message across?

Speaker 45 How to achieve lasting change.

Speaker 84 Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system.

Speaker 82 And when they grow up, the evil will soon be remedied.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 31 How to reach the children?

Speaker 40 What better method?

Speaker 4 than through a board game.

Speaker 43 Lizzie McGee's The Landlord's Game would evolve and become more popular than she could ever have imagined.

Speaker 4 By the 1930s, it existed in several popular versions, all of which took the competitive rather than cooperative approach.

Speaker 33 There was Finance, sold by the Knapp Company, Inflation, sold by Rudy Copeland of Fort Worth, Texas, and Easy Money, sold by Milton Bradley.

Speaker 5 But Lizzie McGee herself had been almost forgotten, and so had the subversively educational version of her game.

Speaker 63 It turns out that when people play board games, they'd rather try to crush their opponents than all accumulate resources together without obstacle or incident.

Speaker 18 No single person created Monopoly, any more than a single person created chess or poker.

Speaker 60 But if you wanted to pick out the one creative soul who deserved the most credit, there is no question that it would be Lizzie Magee.

Speaker 46 So,

Speaker 76 how come it was Charles Darrow and not Magee who became known as the lone genius who invented Monopoly?

Speaker 29 Remember the advertisement for Ms.

Speaker 17 Monopoly?

Speaker 47 Hasbro, the company that absorbed Parker Brothers, began with a lament, women hold just 10% of all patented inventions.

Speaker 66 This situation is finally improving.

Speaker 53 Women made up less than 10% of patent holders born in the 1940s, but more than 15% of patent holders born in the 1970s.

Speaker 18 As millennials take over the process of patenting, who knows?

Speaker 65 We might get as high as 20% before long.

Speaker 28 In fact, we're on course to achieve gender parity in patents as early as the year 2135.

Speaker 4 Cheer up.

Speaker 32 So why has progress been so slow?

Speaker 80 One of the scholars who's been searching for answers is the economist Lisa Cook of Michigan State University.

Speaker 56 Professor Cook studies why certain groups of people seem to be shut out from the innovation economy, in particular African Americans and women.

Speaker 30 For many decades, women had less than equal access to high quality education, especially technical education.

Speaker 59 For example, in the early 1950s, Eleanor Ostrom wanted to study economics at UCLA, but she was rejected because she didn't have the mathematical skills.

Speaker 45 She didn't have the mathematical skills because, as a schoolgirl, she had been steered away from the subject because of her gender.

Speaker 51 Thankfully, Eleanor Ostrom had the last laugh.

Speaker 44 In 2009, she was the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics.

Speaker 69 It was astonishingly late for the profession to recognise the first female laureate, but as Lynn Ostrom was quick to say, she wouldn't be the last.

Speaker 18 As a result of both overt and subtle discrimination, women have been underrepresented in technical subjects such as mathematics, economics and engineering.

Speaker 76 That is changing, but slowly.

Speaker 56 Between 1970 and 2014, the proportion of PhDs in science, technology, engineering and mathematical subjects that were awarded to women more than quadrupled.

Speaker 31 And if a lack of educational opportunity is a problem, so too is a lack of mentors.

Speaker 43 A huge study conducted by a team of economists led by Raj Chetty of Harvard found that young people were far more likely to become inventors if they could see other inventors around them, especially if their own parents were inventors.

Speaker 76 Gender matters here.

Speaker 54 For example, female inventors seem to be far more inspiring to girls than male inventors are.

Speaker 43 And since there are fewer women inventors around to inspire girls, the problem is a self-perpetuating spiral.

Speaker 74 Indeed, Chetty and his colleagues estimate that if young girls had the same exposure to female inventors as young boys did to male inventors, they would innovate more than two and a half times as much as now, and the gender innovation gap would be less than half as big.

Speaker 18 That's why the Ms.

Speaker 52 Monopoly set and advertising campaign, with its celebration of women inventors, is so important.

Speaker 80 But among the female inventors credited on the board, Lizzie Magee is conspicuous by her absence.

Speaker 71 It is an astonishing missed opportunity.

Speaker 18 But it's also a mystery.

Speaker 17 How did Lizzie Magee find herself so comprehensively airbrushed out of history? And why don't the publishers of Monopoly want to acknowledge her more than a century later?

Speaker 47 Could it be, perhaps, that they're a little ashamed?

Speaker 1 Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment.

Speaker 3 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

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Speaker 3 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 3 And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, supercharged.

Speaker 3 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Speaker 3 Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Speaker 6 Cautionary Tales is proudly sponsored by Amika Insurance.

Speaker 7 They say that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.

Speaker 10 When you go with Amika, you are getting coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, so they'll help look after what's important to you together.

Speaker 8 Auto, home, life, and more, Amika has you covered.

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Speaker 72 Lizzie McGee broke the mold in so many ways.

Speaker 18 It wasn't just her politics, her defiance of traditional values in refusing to marry when young, her far-reaching creativity as a poet, actor, novelist, and essayist.

Speaker 34 She actually had the determination to follow through on her dreams despite all the obstacles.

Speaker 46 It's easy to assume that Charles Darrow and Parker brothers were able to lay claim to monopoly because Lizzie Magee didn't have a patent.

Speaker 37 But she did.

Speaker 31 In fact, she had two.

Speaker 33 The earlier one is for an improvement to a typewriter roller, but it's the patent for the landlord's game that deserves to be remembered.

Speaker 90 Letters patent number 748626 dated January 5th, 1904.

Speaker 83 My invention, which I have designated the landlord's game, relates to game boards and more particularly to games of chance.

Speaker 81 When a player stops upon a lot owned by any of the players, he must pay rent to the owner.

Speaker 89 The object of the game is to obtain as much wealth or money as possible.

Speaker 44 Even today, few patent holders are women.

Speaker 43 In Magee's time, less than one in a hundred were.

Speaker 45 She was a member of a small club of female inventors.

Speaker 35 So if she had a patent, what went wrong?

Speaker 13 The economist Lisa Cook knows that the innovation gap runs deeper than educational opportunity or even the presence of mentors.

Speaker 26 There's also the question of whose ideas get taken seriously.

Speaker 63 You can have a good idea, and you can even get it patented, but that does not mean your idea will thrive if your face doesn't fit.

Speaker 28 For example, Lisa Cook's own cousin, the chemist Percy Julian, was repeatedly turned down for jobs as an academic and as a corporate researcher because he was black.

Speaker 17 Eventually, Julian became the first African-American to run a large corporate laboratory, at Gliddon.

Speaker 17 He developed techniques for producing hormones such as estrogen and cortisone and earned several patents.

Speaker 72 In 1950, Percy Julian was named Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Sun-Times.

Speaker 18 It was the same year that, infuriated that a black man had moved into a nice white part of Chicago, racists tried to burn down his house.

Speaker 18 If you're suffering from discrimination, as both women and African-American inventors were throughout the 20th century, then Professor Cook's work makes it clear, having a patent might not be enough.

Speaker 18 A patent isn't much good if nobody respects it.

Speaker 65 Consider the case of Garrett Morgan.

Speaker 24 He was born in the 1870s.

Speaker 18 He was a gifted inventor, developing products as varied as a gas mask, a traffic light, and hair straightening cream.

Speaker 34 But he was also African American.

Speaker 64 which didn't fit America's idea of what an inventor should look like.

Speaker 9 In one dramatic dramatic incident in 1916, Morgan and his brother led a rescue of several victims of an underground explosion near Lake Erie.

Speaker 39 The rescuers used Morgan's invention of a firefighter smokehood.

Speaker 85 Officials awarded medals to the white members of the rescue party, but not to the Morgan brothers themselves.

Speaker 66 And while the publicity about the daring rescue helped boost sales of the smokehood, several southern cities cancelled their orders when they discovered that Morgan was black.

Speaker 78 Morgan often concealed his race, even using surrogates to pretend to be him when he was trying to sell his inventions.

Speaker 45 You can't blame him.

Speaker 40 Lizzie Magee didn't have to fear being firebombed like Percy Julian or having her wares boycotted like Garrett Morgan, but she did have to fear being ignored.

Speaker 37 Her game wasn't selling, and she wasn't thriving.

Speaker 1 She was frustrated at having her freedoms and opportunities constrained by her gender.

Speaker 18 A couple of years after patenting the landlord's game, she took out a newspaper advertisement offering herself for sale.

Speaker 89 Young woman, American slave.

Speaker 64 This stunt, shocking then and shocking now, was a way of satirizing the idea that marriage was the only option for a woman.

Speaker 89 We are not machines. Girls have minds, desires, hopes, and ambition.

Speaker 40 But while it made a splash, this outrageous stunt did not seem to turn the tide either for feminism or for Lizzie McGee herself.

Speaker 25 A few years later, in her 40s, she did marry.

Speaker 28 Her game continued to languish.

Speaker 29 Like Garrett Morgan, Lizzie McGee did not fit the stereotype of a creative genius.

Speaker 4 By the time Monopoly had become a bestseller, more than 30 years after Magee filed the patent for the landlord's game, she was an unconventional old woman with unconventional political ideals, still trying to get the world to pay attention to the case for progressive single taxation.

Speaker 69 She was no match for Charles Darrow, the smooth-talking family man peddling his version of the American dream.

Speaker 28 Darrow charmed the Todds into giving him the monopoly rules in every detail, charmed the artist Franklin Alexander into donating the designs that gave Monopoly its clean modern look, charmed Parker Brothers into treating him as a creative genius, and charmed the press into repeating his tale of creativity and adversity, carving this fictional origin story in stone with the help of the publicists at Parker Brothers.

Speaker 15 In 1935, Charles Darrow put that story in writing to the president of Parker Brothers.

Speaker 46 It is hard to imagine that the company believed him.

Speaker 59 They must have understood that he was lying to them.

Speaker 51 One internal memo acknowledged that Darrow had appropriated the name Monopoly and added, Frankly and I think without prejudice that the original trading game came out in 1902.

Speaker 17 Nevertheless, Parker Brothers applied for a patent on Monopoly and managed to secure it with remarkable speed.

Speaker 47 Then came the business of acquiring the rights to rival games.

Speaker 27 Parker Brothers came to an arrangement with Milton Bradley about their game Easy Money and paid a large sum for the rights to the game Finance.

Speaker 4 They sued the publisher of the game Inflation, yet somehow Parker Brothers ended up paying him at least $10,000 relative to the wages of the day, that's half a million dollars.

Speaker 18 which does suggest that Parker Brothers didn't really want to put their patent to the test.

Speaker 49 Charles Darrow kept telling journalists the story of his moment of inspiration, and people such as Charles and Olive Todd, while irritated, didn't feel able to pursue the matter.

Speaker 18 After all, while they knew Charles Darrow hadn't invented the game, they knew they hadn't invented it either.

Speaker 18 So, that just left Lizzie Magee.

Speaker 31 In one corner, an elderly left-wing feminist, desperate to teach the children of the world the merits of the single tax system through her obscure board game, in the other corner, a smooth-talking Charles Darrow with a tail to tug at heartstrings, and a host of sharp suits from Parker Brothers.

Speaker 18 It was no contest.

Speaker 18 One November day in 1935, traveling from Salem, Massachusetts all the way to Arlington, Virginia, George Parker himself, the 70-year-old founder of Parker Brothers, paid a call to the house of Lizzie McGee Phillips.

Speaker 81 Mr.

Speaker 4 Parker, do come in.

Speaker 77 If we may move to matters of business, Mrs. Phillips, my colleagues at Parker Brothers have become aware of your landlord's game, and we would like to publish it.

Speaker 83 But this is wonderful news, Mr. Parker.

Speaker 83 At last, the ideas this game espouses will reach the widest possible audience.

Speaker 58 That is our hope. Although at Parker Brothers, we talk less about ideas and more about the joy of play.

Speaker 17 And so Lizzie McGee and George Parker agreed a deal.

Speaker 26 $500

Speaker 4 for all rights.

Speaker 12 Or compared to today's wages, Parker bought the rights to Lizzie McGee's creation for just $25,000.

Speaker 13 No royalties.

Speaker 69 But she thought she was getting what she'd dreamed about for 30 years, a mass audience for the landlord's game, which would teach them a more cooperative, ethical way of running an economy.

Speaker 63 She sold the game cheaply, even though she valued it dearly.

Speaker 26 Two days after the agreement, she even wrote a letter addressed to her creation.

Speaker 83 It was not until the great game king, George S.

Speaker 82 Parker, did us the honor of seeking you out and offered you a broader opportunity than I could ever do, that I would part with you.

Speaker 83 Farewell, my beloved brainchild. Remember, the world expects much from you.

Speaker 49 The great game king George Parker quietly published Magee's board game in 1939, just as he promised.

Speaker 71 But it didn't catch on, partly because he didn't promote it.

Speaker 80 After all, that wasn't what George Parker was buying from Lizzie McGee, was it?

Speaker 70 He was buying a monopoly on Monopoly.

Speaker 8 Monopoly.

Speaker 56 Charles Darrow became a millionaire, even though his only original contribution to Monopoly appears to have been the bold concept of claiming that the game was his idea.

Speaker 18 Still, I have some sympathy for Darrow.

Speaker 17 He had been in a difficult place.

Speaker 35 His son Dickey had been disabled by scarlet fever and had severe learning difficulties.

Speaker 46 Few schools would take Dickey and the ones that would were expensive.

Speaker 75 Charles had no job and no income.

Speaker 5 He really was desperate for money.

Speaker 64 As a plausible charmer with a good story and somebody else's idea, he managed to make his name and his fortune.

Speaker 44 Lizzie Magee was desperate too.

Speaker 5 She was desperate for social and political change.

Speaker 47 She was desperate for the freedoms and opportunities that would have been hers without question had she been a man. And she was desperate for her game to reach the audience it deserved.

Speaker 19 As her father once said of her, she wants to fly, but hasn't got the wings.

Speaker 17 The journalist Mary Plon found Lizzie Magee's entry in the 1940 census, the first census after selling her patent to George Parker, and the last census before she died.

Speaker 71 She could have given her occupation as teacher, or stenographer, or writer, or housewife.

Speaker 66 But she didn't.

Speaker 52 She wrote instead,

Speaker 83 Maker of games.

Speaker 62 It was, after all, just one year after Parker Brothers had published The Landlord's Game.

Speaker 5 She also listed her income.

Speaker 87 Zero.

Speaker 72 Just like the makers of Ms.

Speaker 17 Monopoly, I'm all in favour of celebrating female inventors.

Speaker 47 Maybe it will make a difference.

Speaker 17 or maybe it will achieve no more social change than Lizzie McGee did with her cooperative version of The Landlord's Game.

Speaker 24 But it seems worth a try.

Speaker 78 So, when there's a new edition of Ms.

Speaker 43 Monopoly, I have a great idea for someone they might want to include.

Speaker 90 Be it known that I, Lizzie J. McGee, have invented certain new and useful improvements in game boards.

Speaker 89 I'll do one more.

Speaker 81 Letters patent, number four hundred.

Speaker 89 No, I don't have a good thing for numbers.

Speaker 82 Okay.

Speaker 81 Letters patent number seven in the week with the

Speaker 2 door. No, sorry.

Speaker 2 It's a Friday.

Speaker 90 Oh, ding-dong.

Speaker 2 Okay, you do the special effects.

Speaker 90 That was my knee not the door.

Speaker 4 Come on, Parker.

Speaker 89 Come inside.

Speaker 2 Okay, I'll just do it.

Speaker 82 I'll just get on with it.

Speaker 84 Mr.

Speaker 90 Parker, do come in.

Speaker 82 I like that.

Speaker 90 She really is expecting him. She's been expecting him for her whole life.

Speaker 4 Do come in.

Speaker 81 It's May West.

Speaker 82 Too much?

Speaker 39 The indispensable source for this episode is Mary Palon's book, The Monopolists, supplemented by Christopher Ketchum's article in Harper's titled Monopoly is Theft.

Speaker 63 For links to academic work by Lisa Cook, Raj Chetty and others, see TimHarford.com

Speaker 49 Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.

Speaker 92 It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust.

Speaker 93 The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Speaker 30 Julia Barton edited the scripts.

Speaker 30 Starring in this series of cautionary tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright, alongside Nizar Alderazi, Ed Gochan, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobner Holbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Masaya Monroe and Rufus Wright.

Speaker 92 The show would not have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Feyn, John Schnaz, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lacan and Maya Koenig.

Speaker 93 Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

Speaker 92 If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.

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Speaker 81 Exactly.

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Speaker 2 This is an iHeart Podcast.