Made In America - Bill Bryson [175]
With two of his brothers, Parker built the family firm into the biggest games company in the world. Parker himself invented more than a hundred games – or, more accurately, more than a hundred variations of essentially the same game. Almost always they were built around some world event or technological breakthrough that had recently seized the popular imagination. Among his more popular creations were Klondike, Pike’s Peak or Bust, The Motor Carriage Game, War in Cuba, The Siege of Havana and The Philippine War (death and destruction proving nearly as irresistible to games players as accumulating a pile of fantasy money).
But the game that secured the company’s fortunes was not invented by Parker or anyone else connected with the company. It was created during the early years of the Depression by one Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman from Germantown, Pennsylvania, who sketched out the prototype on a piece of oilcloth spread out on his kitchen table. He called his game Monopoly. In 1933 Darrow submitted the game to Parker Brothers in the hope that the company would manufacture it on a large scale. The Parker Brothers executives dutifully tried the game but weren’t impressed. They concluded that it had ‘52 fundamental errors’. For one thing there was no finishing-line, no visible ultimate goal. The idea of going around the board again and again struck them as faintly absurd. Then there was all this confusing business of mortgages and variable rents. All in all, the rules were too complicated and the game took too long to play. Clearly it would never sell, and they politely turned him down.
Undaunted, Darrow made up some games himself and took them to Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia, where they became a small sensation. When Parker Brothers learned of this, they decided to give the game a try on an experimental basis. In the first year, Monopoly sold a million sets, a figure unknown in the world of games, and it has remained the best-selling board game in America ever since. His faith in the game vindicated, Darrow retired to an estate in the country, where he grew orchids and counted his money.
Monopoly was the great craze of the early 1930s, but crazes had been a feature of American life since the 1820s when the word unexpectedly took on the sense of a sudden widespread mania. (Previously it had signified something cracked or broken.) The curious thing about crazes is that they are usually invented elsewhere but taken up in America with such enthusiasm and panache as to make them seem native born. Such was the case with one of the great nineteenth-century crazes, roller skating, a pastime invented in Holland and introduced to America in 1863.
While Europeans were juddering unsteadily along cobbled streets, Americans were building vast skating palaces like the Casino in Chicago and the Olympian Club Roller Skating Rink in San Francisco. Such places could accommodate up to a thousand skaters at a time on their polished ash and maple floors. Often they had their own orchestras, playing tunes to which the audience could perform the latest, American-invented steps like the Philadelphia Twist, the Richmond Roll, the Picket Fence and the Dude on Wheels.
Much the same happened with the bicycle. Before an Englishman named J. I. Stassen coined the term bicycle in 1869, two-wheeled vehicles had gone by a variety of names: velocipedes, dandy horses, draisines and boneshakers. Boneshakers was particularly apt. Early bikes ran on wooden wheels, had wooden saddles and of course ran over much less smoothly paved surfaces. Early models were propelled either by pushing the feet along the ground or by means of a complicated treadle mechanism. Most came