Charles Darrow was a 42-year-old heating engineer living in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1933. Times were tough. Darrow hadn’t had a steady job in three years. His wife was expecting their second child, and to keep meat and potatoes on the table Darrow worked at any odd jobs he could find. He patched concrete, fixed electric appliances, even walked rich people’s dogs.
And then an idea came to him out of nowhere and blasted him into the sky like a rocket.
It’s a peculiar story, this story of Charles Darrow. It doesn’t really have a moral and as far as I can see, doesn’t illustrate any profound truths about success. I wish it did, for then it would be an easier story to tell. A good story should have some kind of focus, some underlying theme about human will and work, or love, or hate or something. This story has no particular focus. It is simply the story of a man who was once poor, who had a magnificent idea and who then became almost instantly rich.
If you propose to read the story in the hope of emulating lucky Charles Darrow, you are bound to be frustrated. There is no known way in which you can force the coming of a magnificent idea. If you want to generate a Darrow-style idea, all you can really do is go on with your daily business and hope that, one day, such an idea will arrive.
The story illustrates nothing except the old platitude, you never know. You never know what will happen to you from one week to the next. Perhaps that is a good platitude to keep in mind. It can certainly be used as a basis for optimism. No mater how unsuccessful you may feel today, what do you know about tomorrow? Is a thunderbolt of good fortune being prepared for you right now, perhaps, by some distant engine of fate?
But enough of this rumination. It can’t get us anywhere. Let’s go back to the story of happy Charles Darrow.
Darrow, like millions of other middle-income Americans in the balmy 1920s, had been a small time plunger in the stock market. His small stake had been pounded into the ground during the 1929 collapse. Now, in the bleak winter of 1933, with a lot of time on his hands, he dreamed of how nice it would be to be rich. Not just plain rich, but fabulously rich. He played the solitary game of “what might have bee” – certainly one of the saddest games on earth. He imagined what might have happened to his stock speculations if he had done this instead of that. He imagined himself emerging from the Great Depression as a real-estate tycoon.
It then occurred to him that this kind of game might be absorbing to other people, as well. Nearly all middle-class folks were short of money during the Depression. Perhaps, Darrow thought, cash-short people would find it fun to play a game in which temporarily, they could imagine themselves dealing with big money. A game played with fake 100-dollar bills, perhaps. A game having to do with buying, selling and renting real estate…..
Darrow was handy with tools and had a fair artistic talent. He had occasionally made jigsaw puzzles and other games for fun. No he sat down and, on a round piece of oilcloth, sketched an outline of streets and housing plots. He gave the streets real names from Atlantic City, a New Jersey shore resort where he had enjoyed vacations in more prosperous times. He colored the schematic design with free samples of paint from a local store. He next got hold of some scraps of wooden molding – also free – from a lumberyard, and he cut the scraps into small shapes resembling houses. He found some scraps of thin cardboard and made them into title deeds.
He had, at this time, no thought of selling this odd new game. He saw it simply as an evening’s diversion for his family and friends. (There was, of course no television at the time). Using a pair of dice, some play money borrowed from a youngster and colored buttons for tokens, Darrow and his wife and friends spent evenings and weekends playing the game. They refined it as they went along: added new rules, new complications. Eventually the game became a small neighborhood sensation.
Darrow called it Monopoly.
After a while, friends began asking him to make sets for them. He did, charging various prices in the neighborhood of a dollar per set. Word of the game spread, and soon he was turning out two handmade sets a day – still solely on the strength of word-of-mouth advertising. It was hard word, but it was better than walking people’s dogs for a living.
When he had made about 100 sets by and, Darrow was exhausted. Order were now coming in faster than he could fill them. A friend in the printing business approached him with an offer to print the Monopoly boards and Darrow accepted with relief. He now upped his production to six sets a day, but still couldn’t meet the demand. He had shown the game to some local retailers, as well as to a few department stores in Philadelphia, and the stores had been intrigued. When one big department store gave him an order for a wholesale lot of Monopoly sets, he saw that the thing he had accidentally created had become bigger than he was. Monopoly was only a few months old, but it was already too big to be a home-workshop operation. Darrow copyrighted it and framed out the entire manufacturing operation to his printer friend.
Within a few more months, the printer was overloaded too. Stores in Philadelphia and other cities were now ordering the sets in enormous quantities – 100 at a time, 100, 300. The stores couldn’t get them fast enough to satisfy the demand. The printer couldn’t make them fast enough, and Darrow was drowning in paper from the shipping, billing and purchasing side of the business. He had a tiger by the tail.
Very rarely does a newborn business grow with such dazzling speed. Darrow now saw that he faced a choice: He could borrow or sell stock to raise capital for a large manufacturing plant, or he could license the game on some kind of royalty basis to a company that already had the plant.
He later explained that, in making this choice, he took the precepts of Monopoly to heart. One major precept of the game is that you can get into severe trouble by overextending yourself. With this in mind, he went to see Parker Brothers.
Parker Brothers, established in 1883 at Salem, Massachusetts, was the nation’s biggest producer of table games. Darrow figured that if anybody could manufacture and market Monopoly successfully, Parker Brothers could.
Parker Brothers studied the game with care. The company had operated profitably for years by sticking with some firm rules about what does and doesn’t make a good table game. One rule was that a game should be simple, and another was that it shouldn’t take more than 45 minutes or so to play. Monopoly violated both these rules grievously. It also violated others. Parker Brothers determined that the game contained a total of 52 “fundamental errors.” They turned Darrow down.
Gloomy – but determined to keep his exploding business alive – Darrow went home and ordered that 5000 new sets be manufactured. Despite those 52 fundamental errors, people were still scrambling to buy the game. Christmas, 1934, was approaching, and the 5000 new sets were sold to stores even before the printer could turn them out. Darrow was working 14 hours a day just to keep up with the shipping.
Parker Brothers was always watching the indoor-game market closely, especially at Christmas. When reports of all this frantic activity got back to headquarters in Salem, the company began to wonder whether it had made the right decision in turning Darrow away. “Suddenly”, says a company report on the affair, “52 fundamental errors didn’t seem so bad.” Bravely admitting its mistake, Parker Brothers now approached Darrow and offered him what company spokesmen call “an attractive royalty contract.”
Darrow accepted, signed the contract and staggered off on vacation, utterly exhausted.
Parker Brothers began to promote Monopoly on a national scale. The company quickly discovered that Darrow had handed it the tail of a tiger. As the 1935 Christmas selling season approached, the company was deluged with telegraphed orders and had to file them in laundry baskets lining the hallways. The bookkeeping department was impossibly overloaded. Desperately seeking help, Parker Brothers called in an outside accounting firm from Boston. The accountants gazed popeyed at all those laundry baskets and went back to Boston. They didn’t want the job at any price.
And so it went. Monopoly was, as the company’s own report says, “the biggest thing that ever hit Parker Brother’s; it is still a bestseller. The company now produces it in 15 different languages. On an average day the company prints some $210 million in Monopoly money (about $15,000 per set). All told, the company has sold about 70 million sets since 1935 – and, to supply those sets with money, has printed something like 1,050,000,000,000. In round numbers that’s a trillion dollars.
As for Charles Darrow, a large number of dollars flowed into his bank account: not Monopoly dollars but legal tender. He retired at the age of 46, a little less than three years after signing Parker’s royalty contract. He never had to work again. The man who had been broke and jobless at the age of 42 was now a millionaire. Not only that, but he was to continue receiving huge royalty checks for the rest of his life. He was a multimillionaire when he died in 1970. His widow is still receiving those checks, and as far as anybody knows his descendants will go on receiving them for all eternity.
The exact amount of money that he earned from his single grand idea is known only to Parker Brothers, his widow and a few close confidants. I recently asked the company’s president, Edward P. Parker, just what royalty arrangement was made with Darrow, but the president replied that this information was “of a confidential nature.” Once reasonable-sounding guess in the trade is that it is possible that Darrow earned about$20 million from Monopoly. As president Parker points out, Darrow also increased his pile by “wise investment of those funds.”
Let’s leave it at this: Charles Darrow, when he died, probably had more money than is contained in several thousand Monopoly sets.