Milton Bradley

Milton Bradley (November 8, 1836 – May 30, 1911) was an American business magnate, game pioneer and publisher, credited by many with launching the board game industry, with his eponymous enterprise, which was purchased by Hasbro in 1984, and folded in 1998.

Biography Born in Vienna, Maine, in 1836, to Lewis and Fannie (née Lyford) Bradley, The family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1847. After completing high school in 1854, he found work as a draftsman and patent agent before enrolling at the Lawrence Scientific School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was unable to finish his studies after moving with his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where he could not find gainful employment.

The Milton Bradley Company

Bradley's ventures into the production of board games began with a large failure in his lithograph business. When he printed and sold an image of the little-known Republican presidential nominee Abraham Lincoln, Bradley's work was initially met with great success. However, Lincoln decided to grow his distinctive beard after Bradley's print was published, leading customers to demand their money back because the image was no longer accurate. The prints suddenly became worthless, and Bradley burned his remaining inventory. Looking for a lucrative alternate project, he found inspiration from an imported board game a friend gave him, concluding that he could produce and market a similar game to American consumers. In the winter of 1860, Bradley released The Checkered Game of Life.

The game proved an instant success. Bradley personally sold his first run of several hundred copies in a two-day visit to New York; by 1861, consumers had bought more than 45,000 copies. The Checkered Game of Life followed a structure similar to its American and British predecessors, with players spinning a teetotum to advance to squares representing social virtues and vices, such as "influence" or "poverty", with the former earning a player points and the latter slowing their progress. But even the most seemingly secure positions, like "Fat Office", held dangers – "Prison", "Ruin", and "Suicide". The first player to accumulate 100 points won the game.

While the structure of play in The Checkered Game of Life differed little from previous board games, Bradley's game embraced a radically different concept of success. Earlier games, such as the popular Mansion of Happiness created in Puritan Massachusetts, focused entirely on promoting moral virtue. Bradley defined success in secular business terms, depicting life as a quest for accomplishment with personal virtues as a means to that end. This complemented America's burgeoning fascination with obtaining wealth, and with "the causal relationship between character and wealth," in the years following the Civil War. The game—and later board games produced by the Milton Bradley Company—also fit the nation's increasing amount of leisure time, leading to great financial success for the company. As well as the watercolor sets, Bradley also established educational games such as Bradley's Word Builder and Bradley's Sentence Builder. Bradley was also the first to release crayon packages with standardized colors, a forerunner of the Binney & Smith company's Crayola crayons and Artista art supplies. Bradley's interest in art education also led him to produce a new color wheel and publish four books about teaching colors.

Personal life In 1860, Bradley married Vilona Eaton. They had no children. She died in 1867. In 1869, he married his second wife, Ellen "Nellie" Thayer.

In 2006, Bradley was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Books and patents

Books Color in the Schoolroom (1890) Color in the Kindergarten (1893) Elementary Color (1895) Water Colors in the Schoolroom (1900) Bradley published a set of rules to play croquet in 1866 written by an author using the pseudonym Prof. A Rover.

Patents and inventions

Invented the Myriopticon panorama viewer depicting scenes in the American Civil War.

In popular culture The story of Milton Bradley and The Checkered Game of Life is featured as one of the segments in Season 3, Episode 6 of the Comedy Central show Drunk History.