Charles Brace Darrow (August 10, 1889 to August 29, 1967), has been credited, erroneously, as having invented the board game Monopoly. 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 took various odd jobs in attempts at having an income. 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 of his wife.

In truth, Darrow became one of the many people in the American Midwest and East Coast who had been playing a game of buying and trading property. The game's direct ancestor was "The Landlord's Game", created by Elizabeth Magie. The game was used by college professors and their students, and another variant, called "The Fascinating Game of Finance" was published in the Midwest in the late 1920s and early 1930s. From there the game travelled back east, where it had remained popular in Pennsylvania, and became popular with a group of Quakers in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Charles Todd learned the game in Atlantic City, where it had been customized with that city's street and property names, and taught it to Charles Darrow.

The Darrow family initially made their game sets on flexible, round pieces of oilcloth instead of rigid, square carton. Charles drew the designs of the properties with drafting pens, and his son and wife filled in the spaces with colors and made the title deed cards and chance and community-chest cards. On these first round boards, Darrow included some of the icons (actually designed for him by a hired graphic artist) that the later Monopoly made famous, such as the large red arrow for "Go", the black locomotives on the railroad spaces, the faucet on "Water Works" and lightbulb on "Electric Company" and the question marks on the "Chance" spaces. Darrow then secured a copyright for the game in 1933.

Parker Brothers negotiated the rights from Darrow to produce the game in large scale. Darrow sought and received this U.S. Patent on the game in 1935, which Parker Brothers acquired. Within a year, 20,000 sets of the game were being produced every week. "Monopoly" ended up being the best selling board game in America that year, and it made Darrow the first millionaire game designer in history.

The history of the board game Monopoly can be traced back to the early 1900s. Based on original designs by the American Elizabeth Magie, several board games were developed from 1903 through the 1930s that involved the buying and selling of land and the development of that land. By 1934, a board game was created much like the version of Monopoly sold by Parker Brothers and its parent companies through the rest of the 20th century, and into the 21st. Several different people, mostly in the Midwestern United States and near the East Coast, contributed to the game's design and evolution.

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