Milton Bradley
Milton Bradley | |
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| Born | November 8, 1836 Vienna, Maine, U.S. |
| Died | May 30, 1911 (aged 74) |
| Occupation | Board game manufacturer |
Milton Bradley (November 8, 1836 – May 30, 1911), an 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 in 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.
Although it is claimed that he invented the paper cutter, this is untrue. 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 in 1860, Milton Bradley Company dominated the production of American games, with titles like Candyland, Operation, and Battleship. The company is now a subsidiary of Pawtucket, Rhode Island-based Hasbro.
Early years
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, 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.
The Checkered Game of Life
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; by 1861, consumers had bought over 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 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.
==Final years==whats up 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 Fröbel. Fröbel 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, Fröbel suggested a pattern of education that focused on the child’s vantage point. Fröbel'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 Fröbel'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 Fröbel'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.
Bradley married twice in his lifetime, first to Villona Eaton in 1860. They had no children together. He then married again to Ellen Thayer in 1869. Bradley and Ms. Thayer had two daughters together; Alice L Bradley (abt 1881) and Florence L Bradley (abt 1875). He died on May 30, 1911 in Springfield.
References
- Bradley, Milton (1892). "The Color Question Again". Science. 19 (477). Moses King: 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..
External links
- Gravesite at Find A Grave
- The Vienna Maine Historical Society has purchased Bradley's birthplace and is in the process of relocating to the site, where it plans to open a small museum.