Dan Layman – Alan E. Hunter

Original publish date: July 26, 2013 Reissue date: September 17, 2020

The game of Monopoly was patented 80 years ago this week on July 30, 1933. The official Parker Brothers line is that the popular board game was solely created by an unemployed salesman and heating engineer named Charles Darrow. Last week in part I, we learned that Hoosier Dan Layman claimed to have developed the game in the late 1920s while a student at Williams College in Reading, Pennsylvania. From Indianapolis the game traveled back to the East Coast through friends of Layman.
Ruth Hoskins brought the monopoly folk game to the Atlantic City after taking a teaching job at the Friends School. Although contrary to the “Monopoly” legend, she and Layman never met, Ruth was introduced to it by one of his friends. In 1929 Ruth Hoskins began playing Monopoly in Indianapolis with her brother James and his friend Robert Frost “Pete” Daggett Jr., who was a close friend of Dan Layman. Her story is appealing if only for the sweet religious reasoning that may have cost her a fortune.

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Ruth Hoskins was a core member of Quaker “Friends” meeting group which changed Layman’s capitalistic folk game to a Quaker based game she too called “Monopoly.” In October of 1929, ironically very near the date of the “Black Sunday” stock market crash, Ruth Hoskins began teaching her version of Monopoly to other teachers, students, and Quaker acquaintances. Layman’s manufactured game, Finance, was not yet on the market and certainly not available on the East Coast at that time. Though slight differences appeared in her regional version of the game, Ruth’s game was remarkably similar to the modern incarnation of Monopoly.
Ruth first change to Layman’s game was to purchase properties rather than auctioning them, as the Quakers did not believe in auctions. Apparently the Quakers, who, according to their original tenant, were required to avoid “impudent noisy indecent behaviour in Markets and other publick” simply didn’t like the noise of the auctioneering. Ruth’s most significant claim to authorship of Monopoly as we know it today is that after she relocated to her seaside New Jersey home, she changed Layman’s Indianapolis street names (one of which was “LaSalle Street”) to those of streets found in her adopted Atlantic City hometown. Eugene and Ruth Raiford, friends of Hoskins, showed the game to Charles E. Todd, a hotel manager in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Todd introduced Charles and Esther Darrow to the game. The Darrows were occasional hotel guests; Esther was Todd’s former neighbor.
Charles Todd claims that sometimes in 1931: “The first people we taught it 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.”

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Ruth Hoskins said, while testifying during the same 1974 trial as Dan Layman, in her pretrial deposition. “To the Harveys [Cyril and his wife Dorothy], who introduced it to the Raifords [Eugene and his wife Ruth, Jesse and his wife Dorothea] … Everybody made their own [board] … We asked everybody we knew that could to come play it, because it was such fun.” Since Ruth’s entire circle of friends consisted mainly of scrupulously moral Quakers, whenever the subject of commercializing the game arose, it was rejected.
“We weren’t business people,” Hoskins explained. “We were school teachers. It was a good game the way it was.” She went on to say that since the game was being played in Atlantic City, it no longer made any sense to have properties named after places in Indianapolis or parts of Pennsylvania. The discussion came up that the names were for the most part unknown to us … Why not use Atlantic City names? … We named them out in honor of people who belonged to our group. For instance, well, Boardwalk was first. Everybody knows that, Boardwalk. But the Jones’s were living on Park Place and the Claridge was being built across the street and the Marlborough Blenheim was right there. That was obviously a very expensive part of the town and one that we wanted to honor.

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“We were living on Pennsylvania Avenue … The Copes lived on Virginia Avenue at the Morton Hotel … So it developed gradually. “… I know that there were the utilities and I know that the four railroads were there … We had ‘Free Parking’ and we had ‘Go to Jail’ and we had tickets to get out of jail and you got $200 as you passed ‘Go’.” The lawyers made a point to meticulously document Ruth’s story, street-by-street, because Parker Brothers’ last defense is that Charles Darrow put the Atlantic City streets on the board and therefore his game is different from other versions of Monopoly. Hoskins also suggested Connecticut, Vermont and Oriental Avenues. “All these I made up and then we discussed it with the group.” Other members of the group added New York Ave., Community Chest and Marven Gardens “because although it wasn’t a street, there was somebody living there”.
In spite of this evidence, Parker Brothers chose to promote the Charles Darrow version of the game, even though they knew that it was not Mr. Darrow’s creation. Parker Brothers officially sanctioned story claimed that “Charles Darrow as an unemployed salesman and inventor living in Germantown, Pennsylvania, who was struggling with odd jobs to support his family in the years following the great stock market crash of 1929. Charles Darrow remembering his summers spent in Atlantic City, New Jersey, spent his spare time drawing the streets of Atlantic City on his kitchen tablecloth, and using pieces of material and bits of paints, wood etc. contributed by local merchants for game pieces. A game was already forming in his mind as he built little hotels, houses and other tokens to go along with his painted streets.”
One glaring mistake pointed to as evidence of the theft of intellectual property can be seen in Darrow’s version to this day. Ruth’s original Marven Gardens designation, named for a residential area near Atlantic City, was misspelled by Darrow as Marvin Gardens. This, combined with the other similarities mentioned above, make it highly unlikely that Darrow’s claim to authorship of Monopoly is authentic. He seems to have simply been in the right place at the right time.
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Charles Darrow.

Although it is clear Charles Darrow was not the sole inventor of Monopoly, the game he patented was quickly becoming a best seller for Parker Brothers. Within one month of signing an agreement with Darrow in 1935, Parker Brothers started producing over 20,000 copies of the game per week, a game that Charles Darrow claimed was his “brainchild.” Parker Brothers most likely discovered the existence of other Monopoly games after buying the patent from Darrow, but by that time, it was evident that the game was going to be a huge success. According to the Parker Brothers, their best move was “to secure patents and copyrights.” Parker Brothers simply did what Rockefeller, Carnegie, Hearst and Edison did before them, they bought out, developed and published the acknowledged forerunners if Monopoly: The Landlord’s Game, Finance, Fortune, as well as Finance and Fortune.
Much of the true history of “Monopoly” remains a mystery, but what is known for certain is that Charles Darrow sold his ‘rights’ to Parker Brothers at age 46. And that’s a fact. The royalties from Monopoly made Charles Darrow a millionaire, the first game inventor to make that much money. In 1970, a few years after Darrow’s death, Atlantic City erected a commemorative plaque in his honor. It stands on the Boardwalk, near the corner of Park Place.
The city of Indianapolis is a mere footnote in the history of the board game Monopoly. You won’t find the names of Hoosier Dan Layman or Hoosier transplant Ruth Hoskins written in any history of the Parker Brothers company. But the next time you’re cursing the skies for the rotten luck of landing on Boardwalk with four houses AGAIN, you can now shake your fist in the air and personally thank the Hoosier men and women who put you there.

**Hoosier Dan Layman with his invention.**

Original publish date: July 19, 2013 Reissue Date September 10, 2020

Last Winter, hundreds of thousands of voters in 180 countries elected a new “Monopoly” token that was added to the game earlier this year. The cat token won the race and replaced the iron, an original piece from 1933. By some estimates, more than 1 billion people have played “Monopoly” since its creation, with more than 275 million copies sold in 111 countries and 43 languages. But while the game’s success is indisputable, its origins are not. What we know is that the game of Monopoly was patented 80 years ago this month on July 30, 1933 by an unemployed salesman and heating engineer named Charles Darrow.
Darrow, reeling from the loss of his career during the Great Depression, enlisted his wife and son to design and hand-produce the very first games eight decades ago. Darrow drew the designs with a drafting pen on round pieces of oilcloth, and then his son and his wife helped fill in the spaces with colors and make the title deed cards and the Chance cards and Community Chest cards. Darrow called his game “Monopoly” and hand-painted one set per day, which he sold for $4.00 each. While Darrow received a copyright on his game in 1933, his original patent model and succeeding specimens have mysteriously disappeared from the files of the United States Copyright Office, though proof of its registration remains.
In 1935, Darrow licensed the game to Parker Brothers and quickly became the first millionaire game designer. When Darrow died in 1967, his New York Times obituary headline read “Charles B. Darrow Dies at 78; Inventor of Game of Monopoly.” That’s the official story line anyway, the real story is quite a bit more complicated.

The Landlord’s Game Board from 1904.

Some say that Lizzie J. Magie’s “The Landlord’s Game”, patented in 1904, was the first real monopoly game. Others claim it was a Reading, Pennsylvania college student, Dan Layman, and his pal, Louis Thun, created a game called “Finance” (that his friends called “Monopoly”) in the late 1920s. Or was it Ruth Hoskins? She learned how to play the game from a friend of Layman’s in Indianapolis. Yes, the game of Monopoly was created here in Indianapolis!
Originally titled “The Fascinating Game of Finance or Finance and Fortune” and later shortened to “Finance” for the sake of brevity, the board game was based on Ms. Magie’s “The Landlord’s Game”. The game featured the now familiar movement of pieces around the handmade board, the use of cards, properties that can be purchased, and houses that can be erected on them. The published board featured four railroads (one per side), Chance and Community Chest cards and spaces, and properties grouped by symbol, rather than color. Sound Familiar?
Hoosier Dan Layman developed his game while a student at Williams College in Reading, Pennsylvania in the late 1920s. In January 1975 during one of the many patent trials challenging the rights to the popular & profitable game, Dan Layman facetiously opined in his deposition that: “They forgot to mention that when Darrow died, he was working on the invention of the wheel.” The deposition insisted that Layman and his college fraternity brothers were playing Monopoly six years before Darrow ever saw it and he had copyrighted and published the first set of rules for the game in its modern form.
In an episode that must’ve foreshadowed the Zuckerberg / Winklevoss facebook controversy of this century, Layman created his version of Monopoly after being introduced to it by two of his Williams College Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity brothers, Frederick and Louis Thun. After leaving college, Layman returned to his hometown of Indianapolis and in his spare time he taught Monopoly to a variety of friends who made their own boards. Eventually Layman got the idea of marketing the game. So, he drew up formal rules (including: “Do not pass Go; do not collect $200.00 dollars, Ownership of a series entitles one to collect double rent on all the properties of that series, paying $50 to the bank, one may leave the jail the first time his turn comes around again…), and got a company called Electronic Laboratories, Inc., to make the board, cards, money and pieces (hotels, houses, markers).

In 1932, the board game “Finance” was first sold by the L. S. Ayres & Co department store chain. Initially, the game was sold in small black boxes (some of which came with poker chips for money) with four different versions of the rules and properties were auctioned rather than sold. Otherwise, it is almost identical to Monopoly including Chance and Community Chest cards. With L. S. Ayres & Co. and Electronics Laboratories producing and L.S. Ayres selling his version, Lyman published the game for a year before selling it to Knapp Electric for $200. Although Layman first intended to call his new creation “Monopoly”, the name was changed for trademark reasons. Some clarity to the Monopoly rights controversy can be found in the General Mills Fun Group (buyers of Parker Brothers and Monopoly) lawsuit against Ralph Anspach and his Anti-Monopoly® game in 1974. Dan Layman testified: “I understood from various attorney friends of mine that because Monopoly had been used as the name of this exact game, both in Indianapolis and in Reading and in Williamstown, Massachusetts, that it was, therefore, in public domain and that I couldn’t protect it in any way. So, I changed the name in order to have some protection.”
According to a Time Magazine article dated February 17th, 1936: “I wrote the entire rulebook for the game of Finance in 1931 (copyrighted 1932) and simplified the old game of Monopoly for manufacturing purposes…” said Dan Layman, “Almost exactly this same game as played at Williams was put on the market in Indianapolis early in 1932 through L. S. Ayres & Co.” This was the only article published which contradicted what would become Parker Brothers’ assertion that it had published the original Monopoly, and that Layman’s version was a spin-off. Layman had forced the retraction by Time in 1936, when an article two weeks earlier had published an article titled “Monopoly and Politics.”
What was unknown to Time was that Layman had sold the rights to the game to a small games manufacturer, David W. Knapp, the originator of the popular 1930s game “Krazy-Ikes.” Knapp was eventually bought out by Parker Brothers for $10,000- a significant sum at the time. But it was a far cry from the Millions in Royalties that were paid to Charles Darrow. Parker Brothers eventually published the game Finance, after simplifying the rules for easier play and marketing it as a separate entity. So much for Dan Layman’s claims.
Although the game company virtually ignored Hoosier Dan Layman’s virtual paternity claim as the “Father” of Monopoly, in the spring of 1935, Parker Brothers paid Layman’s old college fraternity brother Luis Thun a visit and offered to buy any remaining boards of their Monopoly game for $50 each. Thun said that he told the Parker Brothers representative “…it wasn’t at all clear to me how Mr. Darrow could be the inventor of a game… we’d played since 1925.” But $50 each for an obsolete board game at the height of the Great Depression proved too rich an offer to refuse and Thun caved, thus ending all claims to authorship of Parker Brothers’ best selling board game.
But Hoosier ties to the game of “Monopoly” does not end there. There is another historical footnote that binds Monopoly to our fair city.

Tag: Dan Layman

“Monopoly: the Hoosier Connection. Part II”

“Monopoly: the Hoosier Connection. Part I”