Charles Darrow

Charles Brace Darrow (August 11, 1879–August 29, 1967), has been credited, erroneously, as having invented the Monopoly board game. 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 Monopoly to Parker Brothers, claiming it to be his own invention, modern historians treat Darrow as one of the game's final "developers". After Darrow lost his job at a sales company following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, he worked various odd jobs. 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 his wife Ester. In truth, Darrow became one of the many people in the American Midwest and East Coast who had been... full article at wikipedia