Milton Bradley
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- This article is about the board game pioneer. For the baseball player, see Milton Bradley (baseball).
Milton Bradley | |
|---|---|
 Milton Bradley in his old age | |
| Born | 5 November 1836 Vienna, Maine, USA |
| Died | May 30, 1911 (aged 74) |
| Occupation | Board game manufacturer |
Milton Bradley (November 8, 1836 – May 30, 1911) a American game pioneer, was credited by many with launching the board game industry in North America with Milton Bradley Company.
A native of Vienna, Maine, in his late teens Bradley chose to pursue the printing trade, including lithography. He set up the first color lithography shop in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, established in Springfield 1860. Eventually, Bradley moved forward with an idea he had for a board game which he called The Checkered Game of Life, an early version of what would later become The Game of Life.
He also had invented the paper cutter. In 2004, he was posthumously inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame along with George Ditomassi of Milton Bradley Co. Through the 20th century, the company he founded dominated the production of American games, with titles like Candy Land, Operation, and Battleship. The company is now a subsidiary of Pawtucket, Rhode Island-based Hasbro.
Biography
Born in Vienna, Maine, to craftsman Ottis Bradley and Fannie Lyford on November 8 1836, Milton Bradley attended high school in the industrial mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Upon completing his secondary education, Bradley pursued technical training as a draftsman at the Lawrence Scientific School, but could not obtain sufficient funding to complete the two-year course. After a two-year spell in Hartford, Connecticut with his parents, Bradley returned to Massachusetts, settling in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1856. Beginning an association with technological and intellectual innovation that would recur throughout his life, Milton Bradley then began work with the Wason Car-Manufacturing Company, drafting plans for railroad cars. After briefly leaving Wason to pursue independent drafting for patent seekers, Bradley rejoined the company and remained until 1860.
Unsatisfied with his profession, Milton Bradley taught himself lithography and print-making, producing an image of Abraham Lincoln during the 1860 presidential campaign that sold well in the heavily Republican Massachusetts. Lincoln’s decision to grow a beard, and the resulting iconic connection of facial hair to the sixteenth president, immediately rendered Bradley’s lithograph obsolete, and left his fledgling printing business without a marketable image. In search of a lucrative alternative project in which to employ his drafting skills, Bradley found inspiration from an imported board game given to him by a friend. Concluding that he could produce and market a similar game to American consumers, Milton Bradley released The Checkered Game of Life in the winter of 1860.
The game proved an instant success with the public. Bradley personally sold his first run of several hundred copies in one two-day period in New York; consumers purchased a further 40,000 copies during the winter of 1860-1861. The Checkered Game of Life followed a structure similar to its American and British predecessors, with players spinning a teetotum (a top-like numerical die) to advance to corresponding squares. The squares each represented a social virtue or vice, with the former earning a player points and the latter retarding his progress. The player who first accumulated one hundred points won the game.
While the structure of play used in The Checkered Game of Life differed little from previous board games, Bradley’s game embraced a radically different concept of success. Earlier children’s games, such as the popular Mansion of Happiness developed in Puritan Massachusetts, were concerned entirely with providing an attractive venue from which to promote moral virtue. Bradley preferred to define success in secular business terms consistent with America’s emerging focus on “the causal relationship between character and wealth.” This approach, which depicted life as a quest for accomplishment in which personal virtues provided a means to an end rather than a point of focus, complemented America’s burgeoning fascination with obtaining wealth in the years following the Civil War.
Though The Checkered Game of Life and its several successive variations accounted for Milton Bradley's financial success, board games did not constitute his primary focus in life. With his pecuniary future secure, Bradley turned his attention to a series of progressive scientific and educational causes. Having met Edward Wiebe, an early American proponent of the kindergarten movement, in 1869, Bradley began to explore the ideas of the German romantic philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel. Froebel challenged prevalent notions for educating children, which emphasized recitation, rote memorization, and the teaching of factual information from a child’s earliest schooling. Believing that these practices, which attempted to instill an adult mentality in children, ran contrary to both effective teaching and a child’s natural impulses, Froebel suggested a pattern of education that focused on the child’s vantage point. Froebel's theory stressed stimulation of aesthetic and sensory perception, kept lessons brief, presented them in simple terms suitable for a child’s consumption, and incorporated instinctual preferences for play and spontaneity.
Enthralled with Froebel's ideas, Milton Bradley made distinct contributions to bringing them to prominence with the American public. Beginning in 1869, Bradley published educational tracts and pamphlets on the virtues of Froebel's kindergarten system. His company produced two magazines on the subject, Kindergarten News (later Kindergarten Review), and Work and Play. Though neither produced a profit, compelling Bradley’s business partners to withdraw their support, Bradley persevered, publishing the magazines until the end of his life.
Though Milton Bradley owed both his lifetime fame and his perseverance in American memory to The Checkered Game of Life and its successors, his influence and interests extended far beyond entertainment to include popular progressive theories of the Gilded Age.
References
- Bradley, Milton (1892). "The Color Question Again". Science. 19 (477): 175–176.
- Ing, Deborah (February 2000). "Bradley, Milton" (Reference Database - registration required). American National Biography Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2007-01-31.
- Lepore, Jill. "The Meaning of Life: What Milton Bradley Started". The New Yorker, 21 May 2007, pp. 38-43..