The Pan Am Journey – the Singular and Boundless Vision of One Man, Juan Trippe

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Aviation history, Biographical, Commerce & Business, Regional History

Pan American World Airways, or as it was universally known in its peak, Pan Am, is a name that is no longer displayed on the flight indicator boards of international airports across the globe. However up to the Eighties it was one of the premier names in the international airline industry.  At the top of it’s game the airline was completing up to 214 flights from the US to Europe a week (1964) [‘Juan Terry Trippe, Founder of Pan Am World Airways and InterContinental Hotels’, Stanley Turkel (PDF, 2006), www.ishc.com].

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From the ground up

Like quite a few young, middle class American men during the Great War, Tripp gravitated towards a future in the air, at first aspiring to be a navy pilot. After the war he transitioned from running a failed taxi service into a small regional air transport company. Trippe’s drive to succeed led him within a few years to merge his group with two other similar-sized ones to form Pan American Airways Inc.

The New Jersey-born businessman came up with a steady stream of novel ideas for innovation in the airline industry – which however required money. Prospects were bright though as new airline ventures were a good selling point. As William Stadiem explains, flying in the “Roaring 20s” was “the high-tech startup of its time!” Financiers, including members of the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt families, were all too willing to bankroll Trippe’s burgeoning airline industry ambitions [William Stadiem, Jet Set: The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance, in Aviation’s Glory Years (2014)].

By 1927 Trippe had started to assemble the rudiments of a fleet of aircrafts, initially with a brace of tri-motored Fokkers supplemented by some ageing surplus floating boats which he converted into the Pan American Flying Clippers (Trippe was a pioneer of these multi-engine seaplanes). Thus modestly began Pan Am’s first air mail service to the Caribbean (maiden flight in a 65-horsepower Seagull – Key West Florida to Havana) which paved the way for further Pan Am incursions into the region. Expansion followed innovation – from the West Indies he moved into Central and South America, and the foundations were laid for a global transport business✲.AB50588C-D96D-45A9-B209-4EA072696C99

Eschewing managerial orthodoxy

As textbook BUS101 management orthodoxy goes, Tripp was far from the desired model. His inclination was not to delegate and he was given to making unilateral decisions without consulting – much to the chagrin of his boards of directors [‘Juan Trippe and Pan Am’, (Richard Branson), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.content.time.com]. What he was really exceptional at though, was anticipating the market in air travel, working out usually before anyone else what the next big thing was going to be…and going for it totally!

Business transparency was not part of the Trippe management style…his early inroads in the industry owed a lot to his “stealthy lobbying for U.S. mail licences”, which gave Pan Am a precious legup! [Harold Evans, Gail Buckland & David Lefer, They Made America, (2004)]. Trippe took a ruthless approach to competition and was not adverse to doing secret deals to outmanoeuvre his airline rivals [‘Juan Trippe Revolutionized Trips By Air With Pan Am’, (Scott S Smith), Investor’s Business Daily, 09-Oct-2014, www.investors.com].

Pan Am at times resorted to outright bribery to stay ahead of the pack, eg, offering several 100 thousand dollars to a Mexican president to block rival American Airlines’ bid for landing rights in the US’ southern neighbour [‘Juan Trippe’s Pan Am’, (Ann Crittenden), New York Times, (Archives), 03-July 1977, www.nytimes.com].

Thoroughly innovative Juan

By continually expanding the scope of Pan Am’s operations, creating many new routes, Trippe opened up both the Atlantic and the Pacific to air travel❂. Trippe’s list of innovations in the industry are legion  – including the pioneering of round-the-world commercial flights; the introduction of cockpit electronics allowing Pan Am pilots to fly in any weather; he also came up with “fly now, pay later” plans; his personnel came up with an advanced (computerised) reservations system first [Stadiem, op.cit.;   ‘Dead Airlines And What Killed Them’, (Jean Folger), 25-Jun-2010, Investopedia, www.investopedia.com].3165D89F-A045-4A1A-940C-F2CE1BE1E35F

Before Laker Air there was …

Perhaps Trippe’s greatest legacy however was the pivotal role he played in making affordable air tourism a reality to everybody. When Trippe and Pan Am entered the still embryonic industry,  seats were expensive and airline passengers tended to be exclusively from the well-off sectors of society. The airline ‘biz’ was run by a cartel called IATA (the International Air Transport Association) who contrived to maintain airline prices at a high level [Scott, op.cit.].

The first discount king of airlines

The Pan Am boss’ idea was to introduce a new class of passenger, “tourist class”, slashing the round-trip fare from New York to London by half (to US$275). The cartel reacted by trying to impede the US maverick’s move. British airports were closed to all Pan Am flights with tourist seats (Pan Am was forced to switch its European flights to remote Shannon Airport in Ireland). Pan Am managed eventually to get round the cartel’s net, it’s tourist class proved so popular that IATA caved in and accepted the reality of it [Branson, loc.cit. ; Smith, op.cit.]. Trippe’s actions thus brought air travel within the reach of ordinary people.

Airline entrepreneur and “friends with benefits”

Part of Trippe’s success owed a lot to influential people in high places…he benefited from a personal rapport with presidents like FDR and Truman. In fact, far from it being exclusively a triumph of free enterprise, federal government cooperation and support were integral to Pan Am’s overall success in the business [Crittenden, loc.cit.]. 

⍔ JT Trippe & CA Lindbergh (Source: The Trippe Family)02852001-7C9A-469E-9375-60D9D44E153E

Juan Trippe had the nous to surround himself with the right people from the start…in 1927 he ‘headhunted’ the (then) most marketable figure in world aviation, famed pilot Charles Lindbergh, to work for Pan Am (Lindbergh’s Continental survey flights helped establish the company’s early trade routes✥).

Another key figure within the company was its chief engineer Andre Priester who wrote the specifications for Pan Am’s flying boats. Priester set and maintained the airline’s meticulous safety standards [‘Pan Am Series – Part XLVIII: Skygods’, (Jpbtransportation: the Blog and Website of James Patrick Baldwin), 15-Feb-2015, www.jpbtransconsulting.com]. Staff training and airline safety were things Trippe refused to take shortcuts with – insisting on a high level of training for his pilots, flight crews, mechanics and support staff [Folger, loc.cit.].

With a little help from his (fellow capitalist) friends

Trippe in retirement freely acknowledged the help he received from United Fruit Company…the powerful US banana multinational assisted Pan Am early on to establish a presence in Latin America, thanks to United Fruit’s unique(sic) insider knowledge of the region’s states and its capacity to open doors to various governments [ibid.]. Trippe and Pan Am also prospered from cultivating a good friendship and working relationship with long-time Boeing head Bill Allen.

Enter the jet age

By the 1950s the heyday of “prop-liners” (propellor-driven aircraft) had come to an end. Jet liners were the future,  trouncing ‘props’ for both aircraft speed and carrying capacity…and as ever Trippe got in at the ground floor! Trippe immediately bought up big on Boeing 707s and the first 707 Pan Am commercial flight took place in 1958 (NY-Paris)✮. He then got to work on making it more economical by figuring out how to reduce the jet’s seat-mile cost [Branson, op.cit.].

While going full-tilt into 707s Trippe was already looking beyond…to the 747, the jumbo-jet. As Evans et al observes, Trippe had “an almost clairvoyant grasp of the future (and a) determination to find aircraft to fit that vision” [Evans,  Buckland &  Lefer, op.cit.]. Unfortunately for Trippe, the antennae didn’t work as desired every single time and a few missteps had serious ramifications for the long-term future of Pan Am (see below).

⍔ 1st InterContinental: Belém (Brazil)

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Pan Am ‘accommodates’ – airport to hotel…

Inevitably, the holistic approach Trippe brought to the airline industry✢ led him to capitalise on the airline ‘s success by directly entering the hospitality field… connecting the dots between passenger  transportation and accommodation. With government encouragement from US president FD Roosevelt, Trippe began InterContinental Hotels & Resorts in 1946 as a subsidiary of Pan Am…the first international hotel was situated in Belém, Brazil. Between 1946 and 1996 there were 222 I-C Hotels doing business worldwide (>90% of them outside the US) [Turkel, loc.cit.]※.

Changing fortunes

Pan Am – once a ‘Titan’ of the airways – is no more, what then led to its demise? Some observers trace the seeds of its eventual fall to the late 1940s – years before the company had reached the peak of its powers. Earlier in the Thirties, during Pan Am’s formative first decade, Trippe lobbied the US government, advocating his “chosen instrument” theory (by which Washington would designate a single air carrier for all foreign flights). Pan Am in fact secured this special status, initially with the awarding of a 10-year mail contract by the US Postmaster-General. Eventually though other carriers were green-lighted to enter the overseas field and started to claw back Pan Am’s advantage [Smith, loc.cit.]. Postwar, competitors such as Howard Hughes’ Trans-World Airlines (TWA), Braniff and North West Orient were allowed to enter Pan Am’s routes in South America and Asia, and contest it’s semi-official monopoly✧ over those regions [‘Pan-American World Airways: the rise and fall of a 20th century cultural icon’, (06-Jan-2017), www.seanmunger.com]. The “catch-up” had commenced.

However when Pan Am sought to establish a competitive foothold domestically in the late Forties, the US government flatly rejected its request to start a connecting domestic route network [‘Lots of Reasons Why Pan Am Failed’, (Robert J Byrne), Washington Post, 25-Jan-1992, www.washingtonpost.com]. This setback proved a critical handbreak on Pan Am’s expansion into the profitable US internal passenger market.

⍔ Pan Am logo, the “blue meatballs”65E47663-1881-4115-AAC6-F4CBBCA0E7BA

In 1968 Juan Trippe stepped down as company president, however he remained active and influential in Pan Am’s executive decision-making, maintaining an office in the company’s headquarters. Pan Am still looked in solid business shape, it has 40,000 employees and was flying seven million passengers a year to some 86 countries. Trippe’s unflagging desire and capacity for change and innovation was to be a “two edged sword”, sparking Pan Am’s upward trajectory but also contributing to its ultimate decline. Not content with the revolutionary 707, Trippe cajoled the jet manufacturers to design a new “jumbo jet” capable of carrying in excess of 180 passengers⊡. The 747 answered this ‘need’, with the first commercial flight of a Pan Am 747 taking place in 1970. Trippe employed a similar stratagem with the Kennedy Administration which was reluctant (because of the exorbitant cost involved) to embrace the next level up, the SST-2707 supersonic jet. By signalling  that he intended to purchase five Anglo-French Concorde planes, Trippe pressured President Kennedy into launching the American Supersonic Transport project. But this was one instance where Trippe’s ‘hunch’ was badly off target. The Boeing 2707 proved so problematic (and costly) that the project was dropped altogether in 1971.

⍔ Two Pan Ams, 707 & 747 (source: Boeing)

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The ill-timed expansion into 747s: Capacity overload

Trippe, always striving to be ahead of the curve, placed his order for the new 747s before they were designed, let alone off the assembly line! On this occasion the economy brought him and the company unstuck. The timing of the introduction of 747s, 1970, was not great – coinciding with a recession! Trippe didn’t foresee the 1973 oil crisis, which blew out the costs for maintaining the fleet of jumbos – fuel prices skyrocketed after the Middle East energy backlash [Folger, loc.cit.].

The state of Pan Am’s finances in the early Seventies was not propitious for taking on something of the magnitude of the 747. Commencing from 1969-70 Pan Am experienced seven straight years of losses. By 1977 the company’s long-term debt amounted to a disquieting $727 million! The financial burden on Pan Am was too much – and the problem was compounded by one of Trippe’s successors as company head (Najeeb E Halaby) who bumped the   order of 747s from Trippe’s original 25 up to 33 aircrafts [Crittenden, loc.cit.].

Other developments in the world added to the company’s woes. The spate of terrorist incidents involving Pan Am, culminating in the 1988 Lockerbie tragedy, damaged the company’s reputation and precipitated a decline in travel numbers [Folger, loc.cit.].

Deregulation

Another setback for Pan Am came in the late 1970s with industry deregulation. The legislation of course brought more competition for Pan Am into the game, but this time coming from the big international airline players. Deregulation also meant that Pan Am could now at last enter the American domestic market, and it acquired National Airlines which unfortunately failed at a time Pan Am was in need of a financial “pick-me-up” [Smith, loc.cit.].

When the end came for Pan Am, it came fairly abruptly – in 1991. Pan Am offices everywhere simply closed their doors, virtually overnight. Rising costs of operation, falling market share, a trough in passenger numbers (a further blow in this respect was brought on by the 1990 Gulf War which led to a fall-off in international travellers) [Folger, loc.cit.].  There was a failure to make preparations  for a smooth transition for Pan Am after the head’s departure. Trippe, having been so dominant and instrumental in the company’s success over four decades, was negligent in not planning for a long-term successor to himself [Byrne, loc.cit.]. This hurt Pan Am during the rocky days ahead when it was in desperate need of clear-headed, astute leadership.

Footnote: in the 1920s and 30s Juan Trippe was one of a handful of great US airline pioneers – the elite list also included CR Smith (American Airlines), WA Paterson (United Airlines), Eddie Rickenbacker (Eastern Airlines) and Collett E Woolman (Delta Airlines).

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PostScript: Pan Am’s broader role

Under Trippe, Pan Am’s planes could be called upon when required to provide service outside it’s core commercial role. This happened in war, both hot and cold (eg, active role of Pan Am Clippers in WWII; humanitarian trips during the 1948-49 Berlin evacuation; collecting “refugees from communism” in Cuba during the early years of the Castro regime). Trippe also came to the rescue of his fellow “captain of industry” Henry Ford in 1931, by flying the Brazilian military into the remote Amazon to put down a worker revolt in the Fordlândia rubber plantation.

 

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✲ in addition to a purely business opportunity, Trippe’s focus on this region was to help forestall the establishment of a German (and possibly also a French) airline service to the Panama Canal (in which the US held a strategic interest),  [Sean Munger, op.cit.]

❂ by the 1970s the Pan Am publicity arm was able to boast that it was “the World’s Most Experienced Airline”

✥ often taking him to inassessible places in South and Meso-America where Trippe’s workers would follow, having the arduous job of hacking out landing strips from the dense jungle [Smith, loc.cit.]

✮ in very quick time BOAC, QANTAS, Air France and Lufthansa, among others, rushed to embrace 707s. In 1959 the Douglas company debuted its DC-8, virtually a copy of the 707 [Stadiem, loc.cit.]

✢ in the early years Trippe had even helped build airports in the jungles of Latin America to fit in with the new air routes planned for Pan Am

※ the hotel chain was sold to an English conglomerate, Grand Metropolitan, after Trippe’s death in 1981

✧ Pan Am’s role at that time has been described as the US’ “unofficial flag carrier”, [George C Larson, ‘Moments & Milestones: Birth of the Clippers’,  Air & Space Smithsonian, Nov 2010, www.airspacemag.com]

⊡ skillfully Trippe played the big manufacturers (Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed) off against each other, manipulating them into commiting to an even larger jet before they were ready to build it! [Smith, loc.cit.]

The ‘Monopoly Myth’, a Review of The Monopolists

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Commerce & Business, Leisure activities, Old technology, Popular Culture, Retailing history, Society & Culture

Monopoly: (n.) a market situation where one producer (or group of producers acting in unison) controls supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted; “exclusive possession” of the commodity is customarily implicit in the term [www.businesssdictionary.com; www.en.oxforddictionaries.com]

⌖⌖⌖ ⌖⌖⌖

As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler✱, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.

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Pilon’s book starts with two very different Americans, one an out-of-work Eastern Seaboard “average Joe” wallowing in the depths of the Depression, the other a fairly nondescript, left-leaning economics professor at a Californian public university –– Charles Darrow, the individual identified as the putative inventor of Monopoly, and Ralph Anspach, the man who almost inadvertently exposed Darrow as the faux inventor of the game. The unemployed Darrow learned the game from friends during his enforced leisure time…then with the germ of an idea in his head, got other friends to provide artwork (especially political cartoonist FO Alexander) and a written set of rules. Darrow crafted a version⊚, copyrighted it and eventually sold “his” game of Monopoly (without acknowledging or recompensing the contributions of his friends) to games manufacturers Parker Brothers who mass-produced and distributed it – and the rest is blockbuster games sales history!✥

Ralph Anspach comes into the story in 1973, six years after Darrow—made a multi-millionaire by the runaway success of Monopoly—had died. Anspach is an avowed anti-monopolist, by conviction a “trust-buster” who is mightily annoyed at the OPEC oil cartel’s stranglehold over that essential world commodity at the time (the 1973 Oil Crisis). He pursues his ideals by creating an Anti-Monopoly game in opposition to Parker Brothers’ über celebrated game. Parker Brothers sues Anspach for breach of copyright and so begins nearly ten years of legal battles with Parker Bros (in fact by this time the company was controlled by the General Mills corporation)…Anspach’s tireless research for the case leads him to the true, albeit convoluted, origins of Monopoly☸.

The Monopolists recounts Anspach’s monumental efforts and endlessly time-draining “detective work” in minute detail. Anspach traces the game back to one Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (long pre-dating Darrow), and here’s where the story gets really interesting! Magie, an independent-thinking, politically progressive Midwestern woman, was a staunch supporter of Henry George. George was the author of Progress and Poverty, a widely influential text which fuelled the introduction of the Progressive Era in the US (1890s-1920s). George advocated the introduction of a Single Tax on land and property (AKA Land Value Tax). Ms Magie invented and patented a board game in 1903-1904☯, called the Landlord’s Game, based on Georgist principles of wealth redistribution. Magie’s game was in her words, “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all the usual consequences” [Single Tax Review, 1902], the Landlord’s Game was intended to educate Americans about the dangers of unbridled capitalism (ie, ultimately resulting in the monopolisation of business, benefitting only one player)⌑.

When I played Monopoly in the 1960s the takeaway message for me always aligned with the “Gordon Gecko/Greed is Good” world view…gold standard instruction on how to win at capitalism! Pilon points out the fundamental irony of Magie’s “thought-child” – once Parker Bros got their hands on Monopoly, the company left not a single stone unturned in the pursuit of eliminating any rival claims to “their game”⊡. Monopoly, under the aegis of Parker Bros, a game with the sole raison d’être of annihilating all business competitors, leaving a solitary victor, was the complete opposite of what the game’s prototype inventor intended it to be! Moreover, to further underscore the irony, the game became controlled by a company (Parker Bros) that “fought tooth and nail to maintain its own monopoly over it”.

Back to Ralph Anspach’s anti-monopoly crusade – as well as introducing or reintroducing Lizzie Magie to the world, the economics professor’s years of searching, digging in archives, interviewing people of interest across the United States, word-of-mouth, friend-of-a-friend, sometimes down blind alleys, etc, revealed that the games (or games) of Monopoly had been played in various forms and under various names for decades before Charles Darrow’s Pennsylvanian neighbours introduced him to the game. Pilon ties together all the threads of Monopoly’s antecedents – as unearthed by the indefatigably never-say-die Ralph Anspach. What came to light was that Magie’s game, either in its original published form (‘The Landlord’s Game’) or in derivative ‘backyard’ versions, had been played (prior to the publication of Darrow’s Monopoly) as follows:

⌲ among members of the early 20th century rural community of Arden (Delaware), an “alternative lifestyle” arts and crafts colony of “Single Taxers” (including the influential writer Upton Sinclair and the radical economist Scott Nearing who spread the word about Magie’s game to other locations)

⌲ among members of the Quaker community residing in Atlantic City in the 1920s (many Quaker families held “Monopoly nights”)

⌲ among left-wing university students and college “frat boys” on the Eastern Seaboard

⌲ among couples and families in urban Philadelphia (including those neighbours who first taught the game to Charles Darrow)

Unbeknownst to Lizzie Magie, many versions of her ‘Landlord’s Game’ had sprung up in the North-East of the country, often these early, widely dispersed players made their own homemade versions of Monopoly using hand-painted oil cloths, local street names and substitute tokens. In addition George Layton created and sold his own commercial version (which he called ‘Finance’) in the early 1930s. By the thirties a version of the game had spread to Texas – Rudy Copeland’s published board game of ‘Inflation’.

Parker Brothers’ whole claim on Monopoly was based on the contention that the game had no precedents to its 1935 patent with Darrow. Anspach’s pains-taking spade work proved that the game in various guises and forms existed “in the Public Domain” years and years before the Parkers and Darrow came on the scene!

Pilon injects many diverse strands in the narrative, even Abraham Lincoln makes a brief (oblique) appearance in The Monopolists – in the late 1850s Lizzie’s father James Magie, a newspaper editor and abolitionist, was an instrumental part of Lincoln’s political campaigns for office…this digression has a very tenuous connexion with Monopoly! The various currents traversed by the author takes the story beyond the purview of being a straightforward account of plagiarised copyrights and game inventions. The book illuminates the position of women in late 19th/early 20th century American society by positing what made Magie stand out from others of her sex at the time and what she was able to achieve – taking on a number of vocations and pursuits, retaining her autonomy and avoiding the “marriage trap”, becoming an inventor (in addition to the Landlord’s Game she held patents for inventions in the realm of stenography as well).

The three Parker Brothers ➚

Another strand follows the career of George S Parker, the founder of the eponymous games empire. Parker published his first board game (‘Banking’) at 17, and from the get-go was determined to establish a monopoly, systematically building up a catalog by buying up other manufacturers’ games (leading him headlong into an ongoing rivalry with fellow games giant Milton Bradley). In Parker’s zeal to totally tie down the company’s ownership and control of Monopoly, the company even went round buying up old (Pre-Parker) Monopoly sets. Eventually George Parker talked Lizzie Magie (by this time now Elizabeth Magie Phillips) into parting with her patent for the Landlord’s Game, and paying her a pittance for it with no residuals (despite inventing the archetypical business game Magie lacked business acumen and naively trusted Parker’s intentions to do the right thing by her and her invention, which he didn’t!)

The author takes the reader on another diversion, straying away from the origin controversy to surprisingly explore Monopoly’s role in World War II! The US Military purchased Monopoly sets to be sent to POWs detained in German prisons (and elsewhere in Europe). The intent behind this practice had a dual purpose: to boost morale for the imprisoned soldiers, but also a practical one –

Coda: The after-affects of Ralph Anspach’s 1983 victory over Parker Brothers in the US Supreme Court (including the ruling that the word monopoly was in fact generic) hasn’t brought any sense of closure to supporters of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. The public acknowledgement warranted her as the true and original inventor of Monopoly has not been forthcoming. Pilon points out that in the 1980s Parker Bros “quietly began to massage its Monopoly history”…a 1988 history of the company by a former Parker Bros R & D head admits that Darrow was not the game’s inventor, but neglects to mention Lizzie Magie. Similarly, on the official Monopoly website in the Nineties, Hasbro, Inc, which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, starts the Monopoly story at 1933 with Darrow and scantly acknowledges the influence of the Landlord’s Game (again without mentioning Lizzie by name!) No plaque for Lizzie’s prototype of the Monopoly game exists anywhere (although there is one in Atlantic City recognising the contribution of that city’s Quaker players to the invention of the game!)

FN: Mary Pilon’s research for The Monopolists is nothing if not thorough. In the end-piece she includes a long, long list of acknowledgements of her sources, helpers and supporters, she even gives a hearty shout-out to coffee shops in seven different cities (I said she was thorough!)…one very notable exception missing from the author’s acknowledgement of research help is Hasbro! Hasbro denied Pilon’s request to access the Parker Brothers’ archives and outright refused to answer any of the many fact-checking queries she submitted to the world’s largest toy and games company. Zero marks to Hasbro for the cause of corporate transparency…ummm, given how much she gleaned from other sources, I wonder what else they didn’t want her to discover?

The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, by Mary Pilon [Bloomsbury New York: 2016 p/b ed.]

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✱ Pirate and Traveler with some modifications and an updated, aviation emphasis eventually morphed into a similar game called Pan American which I played with equal relish. The idea of these two games was to spin a number or roll a dice, collect a destination card and progress from one city to another city somewhere in the world. When you completed a requisite number of destinations, you hightailed it back to a home base city (Godthab, Greenland), first one there was the winner! The games educated me on political geography and I learnt the distance (in miles in those days) between different places on the world map
⊚ with Atlantic City street names on the earliest editions of the Monopoly sets (later editions of the game utilised New York City streets and London streets on their boards)
✥ a comparison of the visuals of Magie’s original 1904 patented game and Darrow’s 1935 patented Monopoly reveals profound continuities…Darrow’s replicates essential features of Magie’s – a square board, a space “for the emblematic GO TO JAIL”, a “Public Park” space (anticipating the Parkers’ “Free Parking”), ‘chance’ cards, the use of tokens representing money, deeds and properties
☸ Parker Bros, when taking on Darrow’s game, accepted and promoted the myth that Darrow had fed them, ie, HE invented the game from his own head in the early 1930s, and that there were NO precedents for it
☯ by a remarkable happenstance of history Lizzie filed her patent claim on the same day in 1903 as the infinitely more famous Wright brothers filed their “flying machine” patent
⌑ interestingly Magie devised two versions of the Landlord’s Game – version 1, the objective was to crush all of your opponents (= the contemporary game of Monopoly produced by Parker Bros), and version 2 – the objective was to create wealth for all to share
⊡ the three Parker brothers (especially George) were evangelically zealous about this because, as the author explains, the company had been “badly burnt” twice before with two products that they had thought that they held exclusive control and ownership of – ‘Tiddlywinks’ and ‘Ping Pong’