Milton Bradley
Born	(1836-11-08)November 8, 1836 Vienna, Maine, U.S.
Died	May 30, 1911(1911-05-30) (aged 74) Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
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, Bradley grew up in a working-class household in Lowell, Massachusetts. After completing high school he found work as a draftsman before enrolling at the Lawrence Scientific School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1856, he secured employment at the Watson Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. After the company was shuttered during the recession of 1858, he entered business for himself as a mechanical draftsman and patent agent. Later, Bradley pursued lithography and in 1860, he set up the first color lithography shop in Springfield, Massachusetts. 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 later became The Game of Life.

In 2004, he was posthumously inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame along with George Ditomassi of Milton Bradley Company. 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.

[edit] The Checkered Game of Life: The launch of the Milton Bradley Company

Milton Bradley's ventures into the production of board games began with a large failure in his lithograph business. When he attempted to print and sell copies of the presidential nominee Abraham Lincoln, Bradley initially met with great success. After they were released for sale, a customer contacted him calling it a fraud and demanding his money back because the picture was not an accurate representation of Lincoln, who had decided to grow his distinctive beard after Bradley's print was published. Suddenly, the prints were worthless, and Bradley burned those remaining in his possession.^[1] 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 such as "influence" or "poverty", with the former earning a player points and the latter retarding his progress. However, even the most seemingly secure positions like "Fat Office" held the accompanying dangers of "Prison", "Ruin", and "Suicide".^[2] The player who first accumulated one hundred points won the game.

The original game board of The Checkered Game of Life.

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. But 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[link]

Though The Checkered Game of Life and its several successive variations accounted for Bradley's financial success, board games did not constitute his primary focus in life. Once his pecuniary future had been secured, 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. Froebel also used "gifts," which were objects to handle, such as geometric wooden blocks or balls and used in self-directed free play. He also used "occupations," which were materials to learn skills, later arts and crafts and also circles which included mother songs and finger plays. A year after Bradley met Wiebe, the Milton Bradley Company published Wiebe’s book “The Paradise of Childhood: A Manual for Self-Instruction in Freidrich Froebel’s Educational Principles, and a Practical Guide to Kinder-Gartners,” which describes a list of 20 Froebel gifts.

Enthralled with Fröbel's ideas, Bradley made distinct contributions to bringing them to prominence with the American public. Beginning in 1869, he 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's lifelong friend, George Tapley, bought out his business partner's shares so Bradley could continue manufacturing his educational materials. By the 1890s, the Milton Bradley Company had introduced the first watercolour sets with standardized colours and education games such as Bradley's Word Builder and Bradley's Sentence Builder. The Milton Bradley Company was also the first to release crayon packages with standardized colors, forerunning the better-known Crayola Crayons and Artista Art Supplies of the Binney & Smith Company. Bradley's interest in art education also led him to produce a new color wheel for color instruction and publish four works about teaching colors.

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, born c. 1881, and Florence L. Bradley, born c. 1875. He died on May 30, 1911 in Springfield.

Books and inventions[link]

Books[link]

• Color in the Schoolroom, 1890
• Color in the Kindergarten, 1893
• Elementary Color, 1895
• Water Colors in the Schoolroom, 1900

Inventions[link]

• Bradley established a set of rules to play croquet in 1866.
• Bradley was one of the marketers of the zoetrope, a spinning slotted drum with pre-printed images to create the illusion of motion pictures.
• Though this was not definitely known as of November 2010, Bradley might have been awarded the patent for the one-arm paper cutter.

References[link]

• Bradley, Milton (1892). "The Color Question Again". Science (Moses King) 19 (477): 175–176. DOI:10.1126/science.ns-19.477.175-a. http://books.google.com/?id=yIMCAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA175. 
• Ing, Deborah (February 2000). "Bradley, Milton" (Reference Database - registration required). American National Biography Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.anb.org/articles/10/10-00177.html. 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[link]

• Milton Bradley at Find a Grave
• Milton Bradley: A Playful Legacy — slideshow by Life magazine
• 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.

Look up Bradley in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Bradley is an English masculine given name. It comes from a surname and a place name meaning "broad wood" or "broad clearing" in Old English.^[1]

It is also an Anglicisation of the Irish Gaelic name O’Brolachán (also O’Brallaghan) from County Tyrone in Ireland. The family moved and spread to counties Londonderry, Donegal and Cork.

People[link]

First name[link]

Bradley (sometimes shortened to Brad) is the first name of several notable people:

This page or section lists people that share the same given name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change that link to point directly to the intended article.

• Brad Ausmus (born 1969)), American Major League Baseball all-star catcher
• Bradley Ayers (born 1935), CIA operative
• Bradley Cooper (born 1975), American actor
• Brad Hogg (born 1970), Australian cricketer
• Bradley Hore (born 1981), Australian flyweight boxer
• Bradley James (born 1984), British actor
• Bradley Manning, alleged whistleblower / leaker of video in Wikileaks' Collateral Murder case
• Bradley McGee (born 1976), former Australian professional cyclist (road and track)
• Bradley McIntosh (born 1981), member of S Club 7
• Bradley Nowell (1968–1996), American musician
• Brad Pitt (born 1963), American actor
• Bradley Quinn (born 1976), Northern Irish photographer
• Bradley Whitford (born 1959), American actor
• Bradley Wiggins (born 1980), British professional cyclist (road and track)

Surname[link]

Bradley is the surname of these and other notable people:

• Abraham Bradley, Jr. (1767–1838), first Assistant Postmaster-General of the U.S.
• A. C. Bradley (1851–1935), English Shakespearean scholar
• Avery Bradley (born 1990), American basketball player
• Bill Bradley (born 1943), American basketball player, Rhodes scholar, and former US senator from New Jersey
• Bill Bradley (baseball) (1878–1954), early 20th-century third baseman in Major League Baseball
• Bob Bradley (born 1958), former manager of the United States men's national soccer team
• Brian Bradley (born 1965), Canadian hockey player
• Bruce Bradley (born 1947), American water polo player
• Celeste Bradley (fl. 2001), American author of romance novels
• Craig Bradley (born 1963), Australian rules footballer
• Dan Beach Bradley (1804–1873), American Protestant missionary to Siam
• David W. Bradley, computer game designer and programmer
• Ed Bradley (1941–2006), American journalist
• Eoin Bradley, Irish Gaelic footballer, plays for Derry
• F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), British idealist philosopher
• Foghorn Bradley (1855–1900), American baseball umpire
• George Bradley (1852–1931), American baseball player
• George Bradley (Medal of Honor) (1881–1942), American naval officer
• Gwendolyn Bradley, American soprano
• Henry Bradley (1845–1923), Oxford English Dictionary editor
• James Bradley (1693–1762), English astronomer
• James Bradley (Australian writer), (born 1967), Australian novelist
• James Bradley (author) (born 1954), American historian, writer
• John Bradley (disambiguation)
• Joseph P. Bradley (1813–1892), Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court 1870–1892
• Keegan Bradley (born 1986), American golfer
• Kepler Bradley (born 1985), Australian rules footballer with Essendon Bombers and Fremantle Dockers
• Liam Bradley, Irish Gaelic football manager
• Loretta Bradley (born 1933), American psychologist
• Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930–1999), American science fiction author
• Matt Bradley (born 1978), Canadian professional hockey player
• Milton Bradley (1836–1911), board game pioneer
• Milton Bradley (baseball) (born 1978), American baseball player
• Omar Bradley (1893–1981), U.S. general
• Paddy Bradley, Irish Gaelic footballer, plays for Derry
• Peter Bradley (born 1953), English politician
• Robert A. Bradley (1917–1998), Bradley method of natural childbirth
• Ryan Bradley (born 1983), American figure skater
• Shawn Bradley (born 1972), retired American basketball player
• Tom Bradley (American politician) (1917–1998), five-term mayor of Los Angeles, California
• W. C. Bradley (1863–1947), American entrepreneur and Coca-Cola chairman
• Will H. Bradley (1868–1962), American Art Nouveau illustrator and artist
• William J. Bradley (1852–1916), American businessman and New Jersey legislator

References[link]

This page or section lists people with the surname Bradley. If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link.

This page or section lists people that share the same given name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change that link to point directly to the intended article.