Milton Bradley

Milton Bradley did not set out to invent an industry. He was a 24-year-old draftsman and patent agent in Springfield, Massachusetts, who had scraped together enough to buy the only lithographic press in the state outside Boston, and his first real hit was a clean-shaven campaign portrait of the Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln in the summer of 1860 ^[1][7]. Then Lincoln grew his beard. The likeness no longer matched the man, customers demanded their money back, and Bradley, the story his own company always told, burned what remained of the inventory ^[1][7]. He was, at the threshold of the Civil War, a young printer with an idle press and a failed product.

What he did next created the modern American game business. Borrowing the logic of older European "morality" games but stripping them of overt religion, Bradley laid out a red-and-ivory checkerboard of 64 squares and called it The Checkered Game of Life: a player spun a teetotum, never dice, which smacked of gambling, and steered between squares marked Honesty, Bravery, Perseverance and the snares of Idleness, Disgrace, Gambling and Ruin, racing from Infancy to Happy Old Age ^[9][4]. He sold it out of a carpetbag on a trip to New York and, by the company's reckoning, moved some 40,000 copies that first winter of 1860–61 ^[6][7]. He patented the design in 1866 as a "social game" whose purpose, in his own words, was to "forcibly impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice" ^[3].

The war that nearly broke the toy trade made Bradley instead. He packaged compact kits of checkers, chess, backgammon and his own game for soldiers, among the first "travel" games in America, and the orders poured in from the camps ^[6][7]. By the late 1860s Milton Bradley & Co. was producing dozens of games and amusements, and Bradley personally standardized the rules of croquet for the American market, becoming the first domestic manufacturer of the sets ^[6][7]. He had backed into being the country's leading game maker.

Then, at the height of his commercial success, Bradley turned much of his energy toward something that lost money for decades. In 1869 he heard the reformer Elizabeth Peabody lecture on Friedrich Froebel's new "kindergarten," and he was converted ^[6][8]. His firm published Edward Wiebe's The Paradise of Childhood (1869), the first English-language manual of Froebel's method, and began manufacturing the "gifts", the precise wooden blocks, balls and sticks of the kindergarten curriculum ^[8]. Bradley grew so absorbed in the color science of children's education that he authored his own books, including Color in the Kindergarten (1893), and fixed on six standard pigments, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, that shaped American children's art supplies for generations ^[6][7].

The kindergarten line and its magazines bled cash year after year; by the company's own account, his partner George Tapley quietly bought out the other shareholders so Bradley could keep the unprofitable educational work alive ^[7]. It is the central paradox of the man: the founder of a great consumer-products company who treated his most beloved product line as a charitable mission, and who ran a famously informal shop where workers called him by his first name and he might stop the machines for an hour to nap ^[8]. When he died in 1911, Milton Bradley & Co. was an institution, but its founder was remembered as much for the kindergartens he equipped as for the games he sold ^[5][6].

Milton Bradley was born on November 8, 1836, in Vienna, Maine, the only child of Lewis Bradley, a carpenter and sometime factory hand, and Fannie (Lyford) Bradley ^[2][8]. His was a household that turned learning into play, his father is said to have taught arithmetic with apples and pebbles, and the family loved chess and checkers while frowning on anything that smacked of gambling, a scruple that would later show up in the design of his most famous game ^[8]. The potato blight and hard times drove the family around New England through the 1840s before they settled near Lowell and then Haverhill, Massachusetts ^[8].

Bradley enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School in Cambridge to study technical drawing but could not afford to finish ^[2]. He drifted through jobs that all turned on his pencil and his head for mechanism, drawing instructor, stationery salesman, patent-agent's witness (his name appears on patent papers as early as 1854), and finally draftsman at the Wason Manufacturing Company, which built railroad cars, at about $7.50 a week ^[2][8]. In 1858 he designed a luxury observation car for the Pasha of Egypt; the commission steadied his finances, and the lithographed print he was given of his own design awakened his fascination with the process ^[2][8].

He went to Providence to learn color lithography, and around 1860 set up a shop in Springfield with the only such press in Massachusetts outside Boston ^[1][7]. He was newly married, to Vilona Eaton, in November 1860, and freshly in business when the Lincoln portrait failed and pushed him, almost by accident, toward games ^[2][7].

Milton Bradley is fairly called the father of the American board game. The Checkered Game of Life seeded a company that, across a century and a half, gave the country The Game of Life, Candy Land, Operation, Twister, Battleship and Chutes and Ladders, dominating American play until Hasbro absorbed the firm in 1984 ^[6][7]. He pioneered the idea that a game could be a mass-manufactured consumer product, nationally branded and sold, and his early travel kits and croquet rulebooks established conventions the trade still follows ^[6][10].

His quieter legacy may be the larger one. By bankrolling Froebel's kindergarten in America, publishing its first English manual, manufacturing its 'gifts,' subsidizing its magazines, and standardizing the colors children learned with, Bradley helped install the kindergarten as an ordinary feature of American childhood ^[6][8]. He treated that work less as a market than as a calling, sustaining it through years of loss ^[7][8].

The combination is what makes him unusual among Gilded Age founders: a successful manufacturer who ran an informal, strike-free shop, gave his name to a great commercial enterprise, and yet is remembered as much for the children he taught to play as for the games he sold them ^[5][8].