January 17, 2016
“Through secret agreements and shell companies that appeared independent but were in fact operated by Standard Oil, the trust had wiped out its competition and by the late 1800s, the company controlled nearly 90 percent of America’s refined oil flows. Critics such as George noted that capitalism was good at creating wealth, but it could be lousy at distributing it.”
January 17, 2016
“Lizzie had to leave school to help support her family, a fact that she lamented long into her adulthood.
She attended a convention of stenographers with her father and soon found work in that field. At the time, stenography was a growing profession, one that had opened up to women as the Civil War removed many men from the workforce. The typewriter was gaining commercial popularity, leaving many to ponder a strange new world, one in which typists sat at desks, hands fixed to keys, memorizing seemingly illogical arrangements of letters on the new QWERTY keyboards.
Lizzie’s father also shared with his daughter a copy of Henry George’s bestselling 1879 tome, Progress and Poverty. The early seeds of what would later evolve into one of the most popular modern board games of all time had been planted.”
January 17, 2016
“The Dead Letter Office had begun hiring women in the 1860s during the Civil War. And after the war, the office continued to employ women, believing them to be more honest and “faithful in the performance of their duties than the men.” Most women who worked there were intentionally tucked away—obscure secret keepers amid the nation’s growing flow of correspondence.”
January 17, 2016
“An 1869 article in the New York Times argued that women should not make “the mistake of demanding equal payment with men” because “so long as their labor is cheaper than that of men, there will be a powerful reason for employing it.”
January 17, 2016
“Unusual for a nineteenth-century woman, Lizzie also dabbled in engineering. She invented a gadget that allowed paper to pass through typewriter rollers with more ease. The invention also allowed typewriter users to place more type on a given page and made it possible for documents of different sizes to be placed into the machine.”
January 17, 2016
“On January 3, 1893, Lizzie went to the U.S. Patent Office to lay legal claim to her invention. As a woman, she would have been a standout in that office at any age, but at twenty-six, she was a phenomenon. Beside her and there to serve as her witness was her father, himself no stranger to the patent process, having applied for and won a few through the years (including one for a permutation, or combination, lock)”
January 17, 2016
“Though the popularity of Henry George’s theories was ebbing with attendance at meetings and lectures dwindling and Georgist political goals stalling in statehouses and at the polls, Lizzie Magie still believed in them and taught classes about the single tax theory in the evenings after work. But she wasn’t reaching enough people. She needed a new medium—something more interactive and creative.”
January 17, 2016
“At the turn of the twentieth century, board games were becoming increasingly commonplace in middle-class homes. In addition, more and more inventors were discovering that the games were not just a pastime but also a means of communication. Lizzie took out her pen and paper.”
January 17, 2016
“Lizzie even created rules for when there weren’t any rules: “Should any emergency arise which is not covered by the rules of the game,” she wrote, “the players must settle the matter between themselves; but if any player absolutely refuses to obey the rules as above set forth he must go to jail.”
January 17, 2016
“Lizzie created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her vision was an embrace of dualism and contained a contradiction within itself, a tension trying to be resolved between opposing philosophies. However, and of course unbeknownst to Lizzie at the time, it was monopolist rules that would later capture the public’s imagination.”
January 17, 2016
“The Landlord’s Game was a sophisticated way to get players interested in the single tax theory. The goal was to obtain as much land and wealth as possible, but the means of attaining them were Georgist—even when playing by the monopolist set of rules. When players landed on an “absolute necessity” space, such as bread, coal, or shelter, the player had to pay five dollars into the Public Treasury. “This represents indirect taxation,” Lizzie said. Each time a player went around the board, noted by the “Mother Earth” space, the player received one hundred dollars for having “performed so much labor upon mother earth,” ”
January 17, 2016
“After years of tinkering, writing, and pondering her new creation, Lizzie entered the U.S. Patent Office for the second time on March 23, 1903, to secure her legal claim to the Landlord’s Game. She quit her one-hundred-dollars-a-month job at the Dead Letter Office and went to work at a private firm. Soon thereafter, she opened an office of her own.”
January 17, 2016
“In one of history’s coincidences, Lizzie filed her claim on the same day that Orville and Wilbur Wright filed theirs for their “flying machine.” Lizzie’s application made its way through the agency’s paperwork web more quickly than the Wrights’, and on January 5, 1904, her patent was approved. At the time, less than one percent of all patents issued in the United States went to women.”
Notes From: Mary Pilon. “The Monopolists.” iBooks.
