Who created Monopoly?

Games One my most vivid television memories is from the early eighties and the educational programme Eureka, which was a series about inventions. I remember an episode about the creation of the board game Monopoly, of a man becoming very excited after noticing the patterning on his table cloth and turning it into the familiar game board with properties and such.

The BBC Genome now tells me this was broadcast on BBC Two England on 25 November 1982 at 6.10pm and was written by Jeremy Beadle and Clive Doig and was the story of how "Charles Darrow got his inspiration for the game Monopoly from Atlantic City in America."

Except their version of events was wrong or at least glossed over somewhat the contribution of an earlier inventor.

As this book extract from The Guardian explains, "in 1903, a leftwing feminist called Lizzy Magie patented the board game that we now know as Monopoly – but she never gets the credit":

"To Elizabeth Magie, known to her friends as Lizzie, the problems of the new century were so vast, the income inequalities so massive and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman working as a stenographer stood a chance at easing society’s ills with something as trivial as a board game. But she had to try.

"Night after night, after her work at her office was done, Lizzie sat in her home, drawing and redrawing, thinking and rethinking. It was the early 1900s, and she wanted her board game to reflect her progressive political views – that was the whole point of it."

Mary Pilon, the author of the book has also written this opinion piece on the debacle.  Little by little, the history we thought we knew based on patriarchal propaganda is slowly being rewritten.