Why Does the New Year Begin on January First in Many Countries?

Why is New Year’s day January 1st?

Because Julius Caesar said so.

Early Roman Calendar

Since long before Caesar’s time, date keeping was dicey. In fact, the 355-day Roman calendar that immediately preceded Caesar’s Julian, worked on a four year cycle where every other year, an additional month was inserted between February (Februarius), the last month of that calendar year, and March (Martius), the first month of the year; this was done in order to catch the calendar up with the Earth’s orbit of the Sun. That additional month, called the Mensis intercalaris, brought in the missing 22 or 23 days, and to even things up, took another five days from February in the years it was present.

Since the calendar had been designed to ensure the proper observance of religious dates, priests, called pontifices, were responsible for declaring when the interclaris month should begin and end. Since these priests were also involved with politics, they sometimes:

Misused their power by intercalating days or not intercalating them, merely in order to lengthen or shorten some magistrate’s year of office, or to increase the gains of some government contractor, or to inflict loss upon him.

By the time Caesar came around, the Roman calendar was in shambles, and in 46 BC, Julius Caesar commanded that it be changed.

Julian Calendar

The Julian calendar’s beginnings were as crazy as the old Roman calendar at its worst:

In order to wipe out the consequences of past neglect, it was necessary that the year 46 BC (called by Macrobius the annus confusionis) should extend to 445 days. The normal number of 355 days had already been increased by the addition of the ordinary 23 days, inserted after Feb. 23. As many as 67 days, divided into two menses intercalares . . . were now interposed between November and December. . . . This year thus consisted of 15 months.

After this “year of confusion,” the new calendar really started. Intercalation was abolished, and each year was increased to 365 days, with a leap year added every fourth year (quarto quoque anno) to February. The months of the calendar after Caesar’s shake-up followed the old Roman calendar closely and most are familiar to us even today: Ianuarius, Februarius, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Iunius, Guintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December.

Along with these changes, Caesar set the New Year to January 1.  Why? Since 153 BC, January 1 was the day new consuls in Rome took office and Romans had commonly used the name of the two consuls to identify a specific year in question.  Thus, by officially making January 1 start the New Year, it simply lined up with the consular year.

As to why the consular year started on January 1 instead of the original Roman Calendar New Year’s day of March 1, this isn’t known.  That said, there are references that seem to imply that January 1 may have begun marking the New Year as early as 189 BC, which precedes when the consular year started beginning on that day.

One proposed reason for this switch is that January is thought by most to have been named after the god of transitions and beginnings, Janus, during the reign of the second King of Rome, Numa Pompilius, who lived from 753-673 BC.  Thus, it was naturally enough for the Romans to eventually decide to make the switch. However, whether this is the reason or not is very much up for debate.

Gregorian Calendar

Although the Julian Calendar was relatively accurate, its use of 365.25 days in a calendar year, as opposed to the precise 365.2425 days, over centuries, created a discrepancy in the calendar. In fact, by the time Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585) became the Bishop of Rome, the Julian calendar had lost 10 days.

It was this discrepancy that brought about the reformed calendar. Actually beginning 20 years before the calendar took effect with the Council of Trent in 1563, church leaders wanted to restore the spring equinox to the date it was when the First Council of Nicaea was convened in 325 (by 1563, the equinox was falling on March 11, rather than March 21).

As simple as making a Papal decree, Gregory issued the Inter gravissimas on February 24, 1582, and nearly eight months later, the last day of the Julian calendar, October 4, 1582, was followed by the first day of the Gregorian calendar, October 15, 1582. Voila!

Today, the Gregorian calendar is the unofficial calendar of the United States and the United Nations, as well as most countries in the world.

New Year’s Day

Since before even Caesar’s time, people celebrated the New Year. In ancient Babylon, this began after the spring equinox in March, and part of the celebration including subjecting the king to ritual humiliation. In fact, “if royal tears were shed, it was seen as a sign that Marduk [a god] was satisfied and had symbolically extended the king’s rule.”

After he was murdered by a small group of his “friends” (“Et tu, Brute?”), the Roman Senate made Caesar a god on January 1, 42 BC, a date which coincided with the time-honored practice of making offerings to Janus in the hope of having good fortune throughout the year.

Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, January 1st’s New Year’s celebrations were discouraged, as they were seen by church leaders as a pagan practice.  Instead, other days were often used as a substitute varying from nation to nation.  This changed when the Gregorian calendar was instituted and, at least in the Catholic nations, January 1 once again became the official New Year, and it slowly spread from there with the Gregorian calendar.

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Bonus Facts:

• As mentioned, many protestant nations ignored the Gregorian calendar for some time. England stuck to the Julian Calendar until 1751 before finally making the switch. Orthodox countries took even longer to accept the change in calendars. Russia, for one did not convert to the Gregorian calendar until after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The funny thing was, in 1908, the Russian Olympic team arrived 12 days late to the London Olympics because of it.
• Under the Gregorian calendar we do not have a leap year every four years, since to properly align the calendar with the Earth’s orbit, an additional day is required in only 97 out of 400 years. So, leap years are calculated as follows:
  

  Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800 and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is.

Expand for References

 

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Why Bowie Knives are Called That

Marcus J. asks: Why are bowie knives named that?

James Bowie is a man today known primarily for two things- his participation in the Battle of the Alamo and a large knife design that bears his name.  It’s impossible to separate fact from legend concerning an amazing amount of this American folk hero’s life, owing to Bowie leaving exceptionally little in the way of a paper trail documenting the events of his life and the fact that contemporary news articles about him are conflicting in their reports. That said, concerning the topic at hand today, we do definitively know how the style of knife now known as a “Bowie” knife got the name and how it was popularised.

It all started in 1826 when Bowie and his brother Rezin were staying in Alexandria, Louisiana. In the years leading up to this, the brothers operated an illegal foreign slave trade business in which they’d acquire foreign slaves from Jean Laffitte, who in turn had acquired these unfortunate individuals via capturing slave ships traveling through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The brother’s profit from this slave smuggling scheme supposedly made them almost $65,000 (about $1.1 million today) in the two years they were involved in it before moving on to land speculation.

This brings us back to 1826 in which James was in need of a loan for a business deal- a loan that one Norris Wright, banker and sheriff in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, denied the frontiersman. It is widely reported that there was bad blood between the two owing to Bowie previously supporting Norris’ opponent in the election to become sheriff.

Later, Bowie and Wright seem to have gotten in a physical tussle, with Wright drawing his pistol and shooting at the unarmed Bowie. The bullet missed, but various accounts claimed Bowie then lunged at Norris and the two fought hand to hand. Ultimately Bowie had to be pulled off of Wright lest he kill him. But, again, at the risk of being a bit of a broken record, so much of Bowie’s history lacks any sort of definitive primary documents to back up these stories, and even first hand accounts, when available on some aspects of his life, are often contradictory. So whether this is exactly how it happened or not isn’t clear.  The real point here is that the pair most definitely didn’t like each other, partially leading to a more famous incident to come between the two, which gave us the name “Bowie knife”.

After the fight, Bowie was given what was essentially an overly thick butcher’s knife by his brother for protection. This was a knife Rezin would later claim in a letter that he had custom made, reportedly forged by Louisiana blacksmith Jesse Clifft.

At this point, you might be wondering why Bowie would want to carry that knife around and not a gun. It’s important to remember here that flintlock pistols of the age were notoriously unreliable for a variety of reasons, so a knife was sometimes preferred in relatively close quarter fighting. In fact, it was partially the unreliability of sidearms at the time that led to so many people wanting a Bowie knife, and later why its popularity diminished rapidly when more reliable hand guns, like the Colt pistol, became available to the masses.

In any event, in 1827, a friend of Bowie’s, Samuel L. Wells III, was set to duel a prominent Louisiana native known as Dr. Thomas H. Maddox. Both men were known to be mostly friendly with one another, but relations between their respective families were heated, with things eventually escalating to honour needing to be satisfied. Thus various duels were fought between the sides, including this one.

At the time, anti-dueling laws were in effect in the region, so the men arranged to shoot at each other on a small island in the middle of the Mississippi river, where they assumed state jurisdiction didn’t apply. Supporting each man was a contingent of friends and witnesses, some of whom had themselves previously dueled or otherwise come to blows with each other. Notable here is that one of them was the aforementioned enemy of Bowie’s, Norris Wright, who supported Maddox in the duel.

Taking place on September 19, 1827, the actual duel itself ended without any bloodshed; both Wells and Maddox missed their agreed upon number of shots. With that, the pair resolved to end the duel with a handshake, honour having been satisfied.

Up to this point, we can be reasonable confident the details are accurate from surviving news accounts. What happened next, however, is much less clear. While there are numerous newspaper accounts covering what would be called the “Sandbar Fight”, for legal and personal bias reasons, as well as possibly just notoriously inaccurate human memory, the participants of the event would later tell contradictory stories, and even impartial observers’ accounts differ.  So take the details on the next bit with a grain of salt- the important thing in terms of the topic at hand today, the Bowie knife, is simply the general event and Bowie’s use of the knife in it.

After the shots were fired, it seems the two men shook hands, but tempers flared between Wells’ contingent and Maddox’s and a fight broke out. In subsequent news accounts, it appears that Bowie was a central target for Maddox’s side’s men, with it later being speculated that this was because “they considered him the most dangerous man among their opposition.” However, it should also be noted that Bowie wasn’t exactly the type of man who endeared himself well to others for various reasons, including somewhat unscrupulous business practices- the bottom line being that Wright wasn’t the only one who loathed him. So they may have simply targeted Bowie particularly in the fight because they just really didn’t like him and thought this was a great opportunity to kill him without getting into too much trouble with the law.

Whatever the case, Judge R.A. Crane drew his pistol and shot at the frontiersman, hitting him in the hip, then later let loose a second shot that missed and killed an unarmed innocent bystander, Dr. Samuel Cuney. Bowie then got up and charged at the judge, at which point the judge used the gun to club Bowie on the head, knocking him down once again.

It was at this point that Wright took the opportunity of his hated foe lying on the ground to rush him with his cane sword, stabbing Bowie straight through the chest. With sword through his body, Bowie then grabbed at Norris and pulled him to the ground. Using the knife he was about to make famous world-wide, he violently disemboweled Wright.

His nemesis dead, it was then reported that Bowie once again joined the rest of the Wells’ party attacking the Maddox contingent. Using a whirlwind of knife slashes, he seriously wounded one Alfred Blanchard while his brother ineffectually shot and then stabbed Bowie some more.

During the estimated 90 second brawl, according to the physicians’ reports, Bowie sustained about a dozen serious wounds from various attacks, including having been shot and stabbed multiple times.

After the melee ended, the physicians present attended to the wounded, including Bowie and, miraculously, he survived.

Shortly thereafter, the “Sandbar Fight” was national news, and Bowie’s exploits in it became the stuff of legend. Most pertinent to the topic at hand, reports tended to focus on the “large butcher’s knife”, as it was described by one witness, Bowie used in the fight.

In the months following the brawl, blacksmiths across the country were being asked by hunters and other men to make them a knife “like the one Bowie used”- a general knife design that was good to passable in use in knife fighting, eating, chopping, and various uses in hunting, such as skinning and carving up animals. In fact, within a few years of the fight, even blacksmiths across the pond in England are known to have started producing similar blades known as “Bowie” knives.

 

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Children are more creative than adults

Most people would agree that children are generally more creative than adults. Children draw more, ask more questions and come up with interesting ideas. There are two commonly held theories about why we lose our creativity as we age.

The first theory is that as we age, we become more and more aware of practical constraints such as gravity or economics. Working within these constraints prevents us from fully utilizing our imaginations. We must suspend our disbelief in order to be mentally playful.

The second theory is that our culture socializes creative properties out of people. When we are young we are encouraged to draw and play, but as we get older more emphasis is placed on more cerebral activities such as math and reading. Children are slowly trained that being able to do arithmetic is more important than being creative.

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Alternate Solutions

When we are confronted with a problem, we typically look for a solution by thinking about past problems that we have encountered. Because a certain solution worked last time, we are confident that it is the best. This is uncreative thinking.

A creative thinker thinks about the problem from many different angles. This gives them a number of possible solutions to choose from, which helps them find a unique elegant solution.

The next time you are confronted with a problem (even a very tiny one), instead of jumping to the first obvious solution, take a step back and see if you can find several alternatives. At first this is going to be difficult to do, but with practice you will be able to come up with many alternative solutions to your daily problems.

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Reindeer and Why They Are Associated With Christmas

Unlike Santa, elves or even clean coal, reindeer are real. They may not fly, but there’s a good deal of truth around the many myths of Christmas’s favorite animal. Yes, they do live in extremely cold conditions. Yes, they are known to pull sleds. And, yes, their noses really do turn a shade of red given the right conditions.

First off, caribou and reindeer essentially are the same animal and are classified as the same species (Rangifer tarandus). They are also both part of the deer family, or cervidae, which also includes deer, elk and moose. However, there are subtle differences. “Reindeer” is often used to describe the domesticated animals, the ones that are herded and employed by humans to pull sleds. They are also often smaller and have shorter legs than their wild brethren. In addition, the name reindeer is more often used to refer to the European variety, ones that live in Siberia, Greenland and northern Asia.

The word “caribou” tends to mean the North American (meaning living in Canada and Alaska) and/or the wild variety. Because caribou are wild and reindeer are domesticated, scientists agree that most of the differences between the two are evolutionary as opposed to inherent. Caribou are larger, more active, faster and migrate further than reindeer.  In fact, the caribou undertake the largest land migration of any animal in North America every year in search of better conditions and food for their young.

Antlers are the defining characteristic of many large deer and Rangifer tarandus certainly have large antlers (in fact, they are the largest and heaviest antlers of any living deer species). However, there are differences between their antlers and other deer. Unlike other deer species, both male and female Rangifer tarandus can have antlers, but they possess them at different times of the year depending on gender. Males start growing them in February and shed them in November. Females start growing them in May and keep them until their calves are born sometime in the spring. This has led many to note that Santa’s reindeer (including Rudolph) would technically have to be all female because males usually shed their antlers by November- only females have them through the Christmas season.

For both caribou and reindeer, cold climates are where they thrive. Covered in head to toe with hollow hairs that trap in the air and insulate from the cold, they are built for the tundra and high mountain ranges. Their hooves and footpads also are adapted for frigid temperatures, shrinking and contracting in the cold which exposes the rim of the hoof. This allows them to gain better traction by cutting into the ice and snow.

Another cold weather adaptation is that the animal’s nose does, in fact, turn red. In much the same manner as humans, caribou and reindeer have a dense amount of blood capillaries in their nasal cavities – actually 25% more than humans. When the weather turns particularly cold, blood flow in the nose increases. This helps keeps the nose surface warm when they root around in the snow looking for food; plus, it’s essential for regulating the animal’s internal body temperature. This results in a reddened nose, matching Santa’s own cold weather red nose.

It’s believed reindeer were domesticated by native peoples (particularly by the Nenets) at least two thousand years ago in northern Eurasia. Reindeer bones have been found in ancient caves in Germany and France, meaning they once roamed much of Europe. Old Chinese annals dating back nearly eighteen hundred years ago also mention domesticated reindeer. Over a thousand years later, Marco Polo also wrote about tamed reindeer in his journals. People used reindeer in much the same way we use horses today, to transport people and supplies. There is even a good deal of evidence that humans used to milk reindeer.

To this day, there are still certain peoples (including Scandinavia’s Sapmi, Northern Europe oldest surviving indigenous people) who have come rely on reindeer domestication. Native peoples in Serbia and Canada (where again, they are called caribou) use reindeer for clothing, work, food and to even pull sleds. In fact, they are thought to be more powerful than an average horse and can run up to forty miles an hour even with an attached sled. Beyond horse-like chores, reindeer meat is also an important food source and has come to be considered something of a delicacy. (There’s even reindeer jerky).

While reindeer seem to be a pretty obvious animal to help Santa on his Christmas travels, they didn’t become part of the Jolly St. Nick story until the 19th century. In 1821, a New York writer named William Gilley published a children’s booklet where Santa and reindeer were first mentioned together: ”Old Santeclaus with much delight, his reindeer drives this frosty night.”

Later, Gilley would write that he knew about reindeer living in Arctic lands from his mother, who was from the area. A year later, Clement Clarke Moore would anonymously publish his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” otherwise known as “The Night Before Christmas,” co-opting the idea and popularized it as part of Christmas lore.

Although it should be noted in his version he describes St. Nick riding a “miniature sleigh” with “eight tiny reindeer” that had little hooves. This, of course, explains how St. Nick was able to fit down a chimney- he was a tiny little elf.

In the 20th century, it was department stores that pushed the reindeer and Christmas narrative even further. Working with businessman Carl Loman – who had become known as the “reindeer king of Alaska” for selling the animal’s meat across the state – Macy’s put on what may be the first Christmas display featuring Santa, a sleigh and real reindeer in 1926.

Thirteen years later, the department store (now-defunct) Montgomery Ward distributed a coloring book featuring a cute little reindeer with a nose “red as a beet..twice as bright.”  The author was an ad man named Robert L. May who, after writing the initial draft of the story, perfect it with the help of his four year old daughter.

May’s boss did not like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at first, as he felt a red nose implied the reindeer had been drinking.  However, once it was partially illustrated by Denver Gillen, who worked in Montgomery Ward’s art department and was a friend of May’s, his boss decided to approve the story.

In the first year after its creation, around 2.4 million copies of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer were given away.  By 1946, over six million copies of the story had been distributed by Montgomery Ward, which was particularly impressive considering it wasn’t printed through most of WWII.

After the war, demand for the story skyrocketed, receiving its biggest boost when May’s brother in law, radio producer Johnny Marks, created a modified musical version of the story.  The first version of this song was sung by Harry Brannon in 1948, but was made nationally popular by Gene Autry’s 1949 version, selling 2.5 million copies of that version in 1949 alone and has sold to date over 25 million copies.

Interestingly, despite the fact that May created the story of Rudolph and it was wildly popular, he did not initially receive any royalties for it because he had created it as an assignment for Montgomery Ward; thus, they held the copyright, not him.  In a rare move for a business, in 1947, Montgomery Ward decided to give the copyright to May with no strings attached.  At the time, May was deeply in debt due to medical bills from his wife’s terminal illness. Once the copyright was his, May quickly was able to pay off his debts and within a few years was able to quit working at Montgomery Ward, though just under a decade later, despite being quite wealthy from Rudolph, he did go back and work for them again until retiring in 1971.

Today, reindeer (and caribou) are still found in cold, tundra climates across the northern world. Unfortunately, at least according to one study, reindeer populations globally are plunging. If things don’t improve for them soon, they may become as fictional as Santa himself.

 

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Unscramble the Rabbit Puzzle

The following limerick has had the last word of each line scrambled. Can you figure it out?

It is the unfortunate THIAB

Of the rabbit to breed like a BIRTBA.

One can say without NOUSETIQ

This leads to TECGSONINO

In the burrows that rabbits TANIIBH.

ANSWER BELOW
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It is the unfortunate habit
Of the rabbit to breed like a rabbit.
One can say without question
This leads to congestion
In the burrows that rabbits inhabit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Who Really Invented Monopoly?

In 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, a down-on-his luck Charles Darrow invented the still-extremely popular board game Monopoly, making the impoverished man a millionaire seemingly overnight- a personification of the American Dream. Never able to fully explain how he came up with the concept, Darrow once described his invention as “totally unexpected” and a “freak” of nature. Over the last eight decades, the game has entertained hundreds of millions of people and made Darrow an exceptionally wealthy man in his lifetime, with his name forever etched in gaming lore. However, this Monopoly origin story should not pass “Go” and should not collect two hundred dollars. In other words, while still often repeated today, it’s false. The true inventor of Monopoly was a turn-of-the-century feminist and left-wing activist Elizabeth Magie, who was looking to create a game that illustrated certain economic concepts. Here’s the story behind why Darrow is given credit for the creation of one of the world’s most famous board games despite having almost nothing to do with any part of its creation.

The daughter of local newspaper publisher and noted abolitionist James Magie, Elizabeth Magie was raised to question the governing class. She admired her father and was often told she was a “chip off the old block,” which she thought of as a compliment once saying, “I am proud of my father for being the kind of an ‘old block’ that he is.”  As a young girl, her father exposed Magie to progressive, anti-capitalist writings and attitudes, including Henry George’s 1879 best-selling book, “Progress and Poverty.” This influential book was the seed in which the famed game grew from.

Most notable to the subject at hand, the book pushed a single land tax replacing all other taxes, positing that it would affect the wealthy more heavily, redistribute wealth, curb poverty and destroy monopolies.

At the turn of the 20th century, board games were becoming all the rage. As the middle-class began to grow and work moved into factories (and away from the home) and the work day was starting to be markedly shortened (see: Why is a Typical Work Day Eight Hours Long?), the house became the center of leisure activity. Hence, the boom in creation of more complex games beyond cards or dice in the ensuing decades. Knowing that a board game would better capture the attention of her middle-class audience and thus potentially be a good vehicle to help illustrate and spread George’s principles, Magie began working on games based on them. Specifically creating an anti-monopolist and a monopolist game, illustrating both sides of the issue. In 1897, the monopolist version debuted and, six years later, she patented it as “The Landlord’s Game.”

While not quite what we play today, there are striking similarities between Magie’s original game and Monopoly. Landlord’s was also played with fake money and deeds which were used to pay rent, taxes and purchase property. Moving around the board, players earned wages for labor performed and got a hundred dollars for moving past the “Mother Earth Space” – basically, this game’s version of passing Go. Other spaces forced players to pay money. Public Parking and Jail were situated on the corner’s boards, just like today. There were Chance cards, but they were adorned with quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Carnegie. There was even a space that read “Go to Jail,” which means exactly what it does today – one had to sit in jail until they rolled doubles or paid a $50 fine. The game ends when all but one person runs out of money.

Magie prided herself not on the game play, but its message. “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” she wrote in a magazine in 1902. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world.” It was also meant as not-so-thinly-veiled indictment of industrialists like John Rockefeller.

Producing it in partnership with a New York-based firm, though it made her virtually no money (that was never really her goal in creating it), the Landlord’s Game became a popular pastime among the liberal intellectual crowd, played often on college campuses and in the northeast. In fact, its early spread in popularity was in no small part thanks to certain professors, such as Scott Nearing of the University of Pennsylvania and later at the University of Toledo, teaching it to students as a sort of fun example of certain finance and business concepts. Importantly to its evolution to the modern version of the game, it was also embraced by Quakers.

Within a decade of its launch, most of the rules we know and love today from the game were in place in one version or another, and even the name became a little more familiar.  For instance, sometime in the 1910s a variant of the game called Auction Monopoly popped up that shortened the game play slightly from the original, which required buying properties at their list price.  The Quakers would later drop the auction part in their version of the game for unclear reasons, restoring that part of the rules closer to the original 1904 version.

In these modified games, people tended to customize the names of the properties to fit their locality and slightly tweak the rules to their liking. (This is a trend that has continued with Monopoly, see: What Does Free Parking Do and the Many Other Ways in Which You’re Playing Monopoly Wrong That Makes it Take Longer)

By the 1920s, some began trying to profit from sales of their version of the game, such as one Dan Layman, who tried to patent his own version called The Fascinating Game of Finance (later just Finance) but failed when Magie’s patent was discovered by Layman’s attorney. Instead, Layman copyrighted and began selling his version of the board for the game.

After her patent expired, Magie decide to patent an updated version of her game in 1924. This updated version included minor changes from the original such as making it so that if you owned all of each of the railroads or utilities, you could charge higher rents on those properties.  She also introduced chips which signified properties had been upgraded, allowing the owner to charge more rent than otherwise.

So how does Charles Darrow come into the story?

Sometime around 1932, Darrow and his wife Esther were invited over for a dinner and a board game at the house of Oliver and Charles Todd, a Philadelphia businessman and a Quaker. Together, they played a Quaker version of Landlord’s Game.

Todd later stated of this,

The first people we taught [the game] to after learning it from the Raifords was Darrow and his wife Esther … It was entirely new to them. They had never seen anything like it before and showed a great deal of interest in it… Darrow asked me if I would write up the rules and regulations and I wrote them up and checked with Raiford to see if they were right and gave them to Darrow – he wanted two or three copies of the rules, which I gave him and gave Raiford and kept some myself.

What happened next was pure theft.

As explained in Mary Pilon’s 2015 The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, Darrow was desperate for money to pull his family out of the doldrums of the Great Depression. Thus, taking the slightly modified rules and additions made by the Quaker community, and even having the audacity to use the existing not-uncommon name Monopoly, he began making hand-crafted sets of the game and selling them as his own creation.

As for his exact contributions to the game, it seems to be nothing more than some artwork and possibly a few very minor rule tweaks (although it isn’t actually clear if he came up with anything original that wasn’t already in existing versions). In fact, Darrow even copied the game so closely from Todd that he kept Todd’s misspelling of Marvin Gardens, which actually should be spelled Marven Gardens.

It worked out and his copies of the game began selling well enough that he had to expand his operation, all the while pitching the game to various companies with little success.  For instance, Milton Bradley turned down an offer from Darrow to buy the rights to “his” game in May of 1934.

Nevertheless, after managing to get Monopoly on the shelves at FAO Schwartz and having particularly strong Christmas sales in 1934, Robert Barton of Parker Brothers decided to buy the rights to the game for his struggling company. (If you’re wondering, Barton was the son-in-law of George Parker). They paid Darrow $7,000 (about $125,000 today) plus future residuals for the game and helped him patent it. Within a year, with Great Depression Americans imagining they too were industry tycoons, if only for a few hours at a time, the game flew off the shelves, selling nearly two million copies in that short span.

At this point you might be wondering why Parker Brothers didn’t get in a boatload of legal trouble for selling the game once it took off? Was it simply a case of Magie never finding out before her death, similar to that time Lego “borrowed” the “Lego” Brick from Kiddicraft and got away with it (See Bonus Fact below)? Not exactly.

Very quickly after purchasing the rights to the game, Parker Brothers learned Darrow had not been honest with them when he claimed he’d created it. They then traced it to its origin, with a little help from Darrow, who supposedly admitted what he’d done in a meeting when confronted by Barton. The result of this was Darrow’s contract with them being slightly re-negotiated, with Darrow now granting Parker Brothers worldwide rights to the game.

As for Magie, at this point her original 1904 patent had expired, which was good for Parker Brothers. However, the 1924 patent for the Landlord’s Game had not. Thus, Parker Brothers sought out and purchased Magie’s 1924 patent for a mere few hundred dollars and no future royalties if the game should sell well. They then produced that version of the game and sent her a copy, which she was reportedly ecstatic about. In fact, she sent a letter back to the company stating that since its arrival on her doorstep there was a “a song in my heart”. (Parker Brothers also began snapping up the copyrights and patents for other variants of the game, including the aforementioned Layman’s Finance version, just to further cover themselves.)

However, eventually Magie did learn of Monopoly and the song in her heart died abruptly. She wasn’t so much concerned with the fact that people were making millions off her game and she was getting nothing; she mostly just wanted credit for the game’s creation to be properly attributed to her, so went to the press about it.

In the end, all her complaints to Parker Brothers and beyond for them not giving her credit for the invention of Monopoly went largely ignored. In a later deposition, Barton even went so far as to call the Landlord’s Game “basically worthless” to his company.

Parker Brothers did, however, shut her up by agreeing to purchase and sell two other games of hers, Bargain Day and King’s Men, neither of which they ever did much with, and likewise were reportedly purchased for a paltry sum. They also briefly manufactured her Landlord’s Game as a bit of a token effort, but never really bothered marketing it much and it soon disappeared from the few shelves it had been put on.

In 1948, Magie died and the truth about the true origin of Monopoly very nearly died with her, as the official company line has long held that Darrow invented the game. Things changed in 1973 when Parker Brothers became engaged in a legal battle with professor Ralph Anspach over his Anti-Monopoly game. During the legal tussle, Anspach and his lawyers uncovered Magie’s patents. The real story of the origin of Monopoly slowly unfolded from there, though it’s still widely claimed today that Darrow was the sole inventor of the game despite all evidence to the contrary.

 

 

 

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