April 10, 2024 • 39 mins
Milton Bradley shaped not only the way people in the U.S. and around the globe play, but also how many kids in the U.S. were educated in their youngest years.
Research:
- Adams, David Wallace, and Victor Edmonds. “Making Your Move: The Educational Significance of the American Board Game, 1832 to 1904.” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 4, 1977, pp. 359–83. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/367865
- Bradley, M. “Game Board. U.S. Patent Office. April 3, 1866. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/21/56/40/6993536471b841/US53561.pdf
- “Bradley’s Mechanical and Mathematical Institute … “ The Berkshire County Eagle. July 23, 1858. https://www.newspapers.com/image/532891626/?terms=%22milton%20bradley%22%20&match=1
- “The Cars for Egypt.” Vermont Press. March 13, 1858. https://www.newspapers.com/image/547100306/?terms=%22milton%20bradley%22%20&match=1
- “The Checkered Game of Life.” Hasbro. https://www.hasbro.com/common/documents/5b96f7161d3711ddbd0b0800200c9a66/858C69C319B9F3691003C63AB0E8078A.pdf
- “The Game of Life: A 2010 National Toy Hall of Fame Inductee.” The Strong National Museum of Play. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/the-game-of-life-a-2010-national-toy-hall-of-fame-inductee/
- Hastings, C.C. “Paper Cutter.” U.S. Patent Office. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/07/48/11/e31cbdcbdc7c2c/US1123190.pdf
- Lepore, Jill. “The Meaning of Life.” The New Yorker. May 14, 2007. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/21/the-meaning-of-life
- “Milton Bradley.” National Inventors Hall of Fame. https://www.invent.org/inductees/milton-bradley
- Shea, James J. and Charles E. Mercer. “It’s All in the Game.” New York. Putnam. 1960.
- Shea, James J., Jr. “The Milton Bradley Story.” New York, Newcomen Society in North America. 1973. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/miltonbradleysto0000shea/page/n31/mode/2up
- “WHISKERS FOR VOTES, OR WHY ABRAHAM LINCOLN GREW A BEARD.” Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites. August 31, 2021. https://www.indianamuseum.org/blog-post/whiskers-for-votes-or-why-abraham-lincoln-grew-a-beard/#:~:text=Silly%20affection%20or%20not%2C%20later,trip%20prior%20to%20his%20inauguration
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye,
and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy Milton Bradley has been
on my list for a little minute. I think that
came up when we were talking about wig aboards. Maybe
(00:23):
maybe I haven't revisited that that Outlinington to refresh, but
he comes up periodic. He's just bumped up against a
lot of stuff that I have been looking at lately,
and most recently, when I was looking at inventors, his
name kept popping up, even though he wasn't directly related
to anything that we've talked about. And I like him
(00:43):
because he's a good one that does not spoiler alert
appear to have been a monster, which is always a refresher,
although he certainly could get obsessed with things that other
people didn't agree with. But he did contribute to a
lot of fun, although he believed in very moral fun,
which kind of tickles me a little bit. So I
don't think it's an overreach to say that he has
(01:05):
shaped not only the way people in the US and
around the globe play, but also in surprising ways if
you don't know his life story, he also shaped how
a lot of us have been educated in our youngest years.
And so I think that merits a little chat. Yeah,
seems like a good reason to me. Milton Bradley was
(01:26):
born November eighth, eighteen thirty six, in Vienna, Maine. The
Bradleys were really not well off. Lewis Bradley, Milton's father
was a craftsman. His mother was Fanny Leiford Bradley. Milton
was their only child. Lewis worked in a lot of
different jobs as a farm hand, in carpentry, handyman work,
(01:47):
odd jobs of just about any kind. In the mid
eighteen forties, he learned how to make starch from potatoes
and started a company to sell this starch. But then
there was a potato blight which ruined that plan and
left the Bradley family with almost nothing. Really, all their
savings had been invested in equipment for the potato processing.
(02:09):
A lack of income led to a change of locations,
so when Milton was eleven, the family moved to Luwell, Massachusetts,
where there was mill work. Yes, in an odd bit
of happenstance, this is yet another episode where a cotton
mill is featured because that is where his father worked.
Milton went to Lowell School, his primary school and his
(02:30):
high school, and he was particularly good at math and
science as a student, but he was also very interested
in and fairly skilled at art, specifically drawing, with no
real outlet for that through the school system, So after
he graduated, he got work in a draftsman's office, you know,
as a very low level office boy essentially, and then
(02:50):
he also sold stationery to residents of boarding houses as
a side job so that he could save up some money.
And the reason he was trying to sock away money
is because because he wanted tuition funds because in eighteen
fifty four he enrolled at Lawrence Scientific School. That school
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, eventually became part of Harvard. Bradley lived
(03:12):
at home while he was going to school so he
could stretch his savings. Was just a few hundred dollars.
That meant his commute was just under thirty miles each
way to and from school. This would have been a
pretty arduous schedule of long days for any commuter. It
was really the only way that this was going to work, though.
(03:33):
Following work where Lewis Bradley could find it. Milton's parents
made another move, this time to Hartford, Connecticut, and that
was two years into his college education, and this caused
a little problem because Milton could not afford to move
out on his own, so he had to move with
his parents just six months shy of finishing his studies.
(03:53):
But then at nineteen Milton decided he needed to earn
a living and make his own way, and so he
moved not far away from there to Springfield, Massachusetts, and
that is where he got his first job. The way
he got that job sounds a little unbelievable. You really
could not do this today. He marched into the offices
of the Wasson Locomotive car Works in Springfield and asked
(04:14):
if they had a draftsman. The person he spoke to
said that they did not, and Bradley offered himself as
one and was hired on the spot at the rate
of a dollar and twenty five cents a day. According
to his diary recollection of the event, Bradley had been
clear when he was asked he didn't have any practical
experience in this, and when he was questioned as to
(04:36):
whether he could draw a locomotive He said, I never have,
but I think I could. I feel like just show
up someplace and ask for a job. As like bad
job advice from yeah, I mean it's ongoing bad job advice,
but like also having no experience whatsoever is it makes
it a whole other level. Bradley left the office and
(04:58):
found himself a room at a house, and it probably
seemed like the start of great things for him. But
Wasson had financial problems and just a year into Bradley's
time there, this firm closed. I mean, to his credit,
he was right, he could. He actually turned out to
be a pretty good draftsman, and he had some experience
(05:19):
in an office, just not drawing trains. Bradley was, ever
trying to find ways to generate income. In eighteen fifty eight,
after the closing of the Locomotive car Works, he started
running ads in a variety of papers in the Massachusetts
area that read Bradley's Mechanical and Mathematical Institute. The subscriber,
formerly draftsman for the Springfield Locomotive Works, is now prepared
(05:42):
to give practical instruction in mechanical drawing in all its
branches viz. Detail working drawings, in plans, elevations and sections,
line and brushshading, coloring, geometrical projection, linear perspective, et cetera,
et cetera. Drawing instruments furnished at importers prices, Particular attention
(06:03):
given to working drawings of new machinery, also to patent
office drawings and specifications. During this early phase of being
in business for himself, Milton met a young woman named
by LOONA Eaton and they started a courtship, but Milton
knew he could not marry her unless he had money
coming in, and he was really not drumming up any
(06:25):
business at all at first, But then wast And Locomotive
had a commission to start production of train cars again
in eighteen fifty eight from a surprising client, which was Egypt.
The Alexandria and Cairo Railroad needed cars and the plant
was back up and running. Milton was contracted by Wasson
(06:46):
to draft drawings of the cars to be shipped along
with the cars themselves, so the workers who unpacked them
understood exactly how everything worked and should look. Bradley made
a nice sum of money from this commission, and he
planned to use it by purchasing equipment for his new company.
He also bought a desk for his mother and a
(07:06):
ring for Filona. As part of this. Bradley had developed
an interest in lithographs because they had sent him a
lithograph of one of his drawings of the train car,
and he started to realize this was a potential business enterprise.
There were not many lithograph presses around at this time.
The closest one to Springfield was in Boston that was
(07:27):
about ninety miles away. So Bradley thought that if he
could offer lithograph printing, he'd be the only one for
quite a distance and he might be able to carve
out kind of a niche industry for himself. And when
he reached out to an old friend from Lowell who
was named George Tapley, who will come up a lot
in his life story about buying a lithograph press from
the firm that Tapley worked at in Providence, Rhode Island,
(07:49):
Milton Bradley was invited to come and see one. He did,
and he bought it, and over the course of a
two week stay he learned how it worked. He brought
that press back to Field and set up his shop
as a lithographer and publisher, taking down the previous sign
that touted his services as a mechanical draftsman and patent solicitor.
(08:10):
And his first commission was working on a design showcase
book for a monument maker, and then soon he stayed
pretty constantly busy with orders. More bad fortune was on
the way for Bradley, though, as the United States was
embroiled in the growing conflict that would eventually become the
Civil War, he did not have any clients lining up
(08:30):
for the use of his printing services. But as the
press sat unused, Milton Bradley brainstormed other ways to try
to bring in money, and he finally came up with
something that would make him a household name. So that
big turning moment in Milton Bradley's business life came when
he produced a board game called The Checkered Game of Life.
(08:52):
This game debuted in eighteen sixty, but it is unclear
where the idea for it came from. So there's a
book called The Milton Bradley Story, which is a print
version of a nineteen seventy three lecture given by James J.
Shay Junior, who was president of the Milton Bradley Company
at the time, and in that lecture he describes this
(09:12):
moment this way quote, Milton Bradley's press stood idle and
bankruptcy threatened. It was during this period that an inventor
came to him with a game called the Checkered Game
of Life. Mister Bradley seized upon this opportunity and produced
and sold forty five thousand copies of the game the
first year. So that raised my eyebrow, because who is
(09:33):
this inventor who seems to have been cut out of
this whole thing. But it also seems like this account
might have been based on a misunderstanding of the actual events.
In a version written by James J. Shay Senior thirteen
years before his son's speech, he stated that Milton's old
friend George Tapley, had visited Bradley when the young entrepreneur
(09:54):
was feeling dejected and stressed about money, and Tapley, who
had his own problem but was overall and optimist, suggested
that they play a game. And according to the older account,
this evening of play of an unnamed but old English
board game inspired Milton Bradley to invent a game that
he could print himself on his lithograph press. Tapley, like Bradley,
(10:19):
was out of work. But it's possible that because he
had been an associate of Bradley's and had some business
connections with him, this may have just been a case
of sort of misspoken details. Yeah, how Tapley maybe got
characterized as another inventor in that seventy three speech may
have been because of that. But it does appear that
(10:40):
Milton Bradley did not steal this idea from anyone. Coming up,
we are going to talk about how that inspiration, though
wherever it came from, led to Milton Bradley very carefully
and thoughtfully crafting his first game. But first we're going
to hear from the sponsors that support the show. Milton
(11:06):
Bradley worked really hard to design this first game, and
he play tested it with his friend George Tapley, and
then he worked very hard to actually produce it because
in addition to the printing that needed to be done
to produce the board, there was also the need to
package it in a way that made sense and made
it attractive to prospective buyers. This was, of course, well
before machinery that automated the cutting, labeling, or packing of
(11:29):
game boxes, and what packaging machinery there was would have
been way out of Milton Bradley's access. Those were all
things that Bradley had to do by hand, initially with
one assistant to help him. And after they had assembled
several hundred units of the game, which apparently took many
six day a week work weeks that were twelve plus
hours a day, Bradley packed all of these up and
(11:51):
went with them to New York, planning to go store
to store on cold calls, just seeing if anyone wanted
to stock this new game that he had gone. He
asked for fifty cents per unit, but he wrote in
his diary that he honestly didn't have any idea what
retailers might charge for them. It was kind of like,
I don't know what my invention's worth, but here's where
I priced it, knowing a number of people who are
(12:15):
board game developers and how much time it often takes
to just like mock up one prototype of their game,
not even with a box to ship it in or
any of that laborious. Yes, in two days, Milton was
out of stock. Stores had been pretty enthusiastic about stocking
a game that seemed like a fun way to play
(12:37):
act through life and teach kids morality along the way,
Because that was the intention of Bradley's design. The game
manual instructions expounded on its inherent morality quote. This game represents,
as indicated by the name, the Checkered Journey of Life,
and is intended to present the various vices and virtues
(13:00):
in their natural relation to each other, the whole being
embodied in an attractive and entertaining amusement well calculated to
interest youth or adults. Each player, represented by his counter
or man, starts in the cradle or infancy and endeavors
to reach happy old age by the best course he
(13:21):
can select, striving not gain on his journey that which
shall make him the most prosperous, and to shun that
which will retard him in his progress. The journey of
life is governed by a combination of chance and judgment,
the chance representing the circumstance in life over which we
apparently have no control, but which are nevertheless governed to
(13:44):
a great extent by the voluntary actions of our past lives.
So in the game, the player oftentimes has choice of
a number of moves which he can make to more
or less apparent advantage, and at other times circumstances compel
him to pursue a course greatly to his disadvantage. But
any such necessity can generally be traced to some a
(14:07):
false move made in the former part of the game,
the effects of which could not be foreseen. You have
to live your life right or you will lose. You
brought this on yourself, Holly. The success of Bradley's first
trip to New York gave him the confidence to finally
set a date and get married to his fiancee, and
(14:29):
he and Viilona were wed on November eighth, eighteen sixty.
That was the same day that Milton turned twenty four,
so he was still a very young man as he
was doing all of this. All of this happened alongside
another event from Bradley's life that seems like it would
lead to wealth, but then hit a stumbling block. His
next business venture with the press was making mass market
(14:51):
prints of a photograph of then Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln.
This probably seemed like a sure fire away to make
money Bradley, he seemed to think, so he printed several
hundred thousand of the photos, and they probably would have
been lucrative were it not for just a bad bit
of luck. In the time between sitting for the photo
(15:13):
that Milton Bradley used as the basis for the Prince
and the time that the election was over, Lincoln's appearance changed.
This is a little bit of a side story, but
I wanted to do included because I found it so charming.
The decision on Lincoln's part to grow a beard came,
it seems, from an exchange that he had with a
girl named Grace Bedell, who was an eleven year old
(15:35):
from New York. Grace wrote the candidate Lincoln a letter
in which she said, quote, I have got four brothers,
and a part of them will vote for you anyway,
and if you will let your whiskers grow, I will
try and get the rest of them to vote for
you. You would look a great deal better, for your face
is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, and they
would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then
(15:57):
you would be president. This is like so political logic.
Although the return letter that Lincoln wrote to Grace pondered
whether people might think his having a beard after he
did not would be a silly affectation, he did grow
one in the months that followed. And then Lincoln met
Grace Biddell in early eighteen sixty one when he was
(16:19):
in New York, and he allegedly told her that he
had grown his whiskers just for her. Just probably not true,
but it is. He did tell her that it is
probably not the reason he did it, but it is
a very sweet story. Yeah. Yeah, I like the part
of having an incredibly contentious and impactful election boiled down
(16:40):
to whether he had a beard. Yeah, grow your whiskers. Yeah.
Once the president was headed to his inauguration, he was
no longer the clean shaven man in Bradley's souvenir photos
Bradley's remaining prince were worthless. Lincoln looked so different with
a beard than he did clean shaven that nobody wanted
to buy these. He wound up destroying the stock. There
(17:03):
are you can find pictures of that original print, and
it is I mean, I think most of us at
this point have probably seen pictures of Abraham Lincoln with
and without beard, and he does look so very different.
I could see why at the time you will be like,
I don't know, is that him? I also, I am
not a person who would buy a picture of the president. No,
(17:24):
me either, but you know, they didn't have streaming services.
Then they had to do whatever kept their lives entertained.
So Bradley had sort of put the checkered Game of
Life aside while he focused on this souvenir Lincoln portrait project.
He did get occasional orders for his board game, but
though they had initially been very, very exuberantly received, it
(17:46):
kind of slowed to a trickle, and then about the
time he was feeling really anxious about money and his
tanked photoplan and his lack of continued interest in his game,
the gaming business started to actually pick up. But then
the Civil War began and Bradley thought it was just
not the time for fun amusements. It kind of seemed
in bad taste for him to be marketing a game,
(18:09):
and early on in the conflict, he was also asked
by the superintendent of the Union Army armory to work
once again as a draftsman, drawing up plans for a
new rifle, and Bradley also wanted to enlist with the Union,
but he was told that his skills as a draftsman
were too valuable. The line that comes up in the
biographies of him, is this superintendent saying a lot of
(18:32):
men can shoot a gun and go to war, but
they can't all draw. When Milton saw a battalion of
soldiers camped in Springfield, he was, per his account, struck
by the vacant looks on their faces as they stood
or sat around campfires. He worried that their downtime had
nothing to fill it, so they were stuck in a
(18:53):
cycle of active conflict, training for conflict, or dread of conflict.
And he got the idea that maybe his game invention
would actually help the war effort. So in the hours
he wasn't working on drawings for the armory, he started
designing compact game kits. He knew they had to be
small and light. They could not weigh down or hinder
(19:14):
a soldier in any way. He started handing out the
game kits once they were finished, and they included pasteboard
versions of Chess, Checkers, backgammon, several different dominoes games, and
the Checkered Game of Life. And then he also started
to offer these compact game kits for sale. They were
one dollar per kit. He wasn't selling them to soldiers,
(19:34):
he would sell them to stores and they could resell them,
or they could donate them to the army. And charity
organizations also started buying them in bulk to give out
to soldiers, and soon they'll order rate really skyrocketed, and
this had the interesting secondary effect of also kickstarting a
new level of interest in the original Checkered Game of Life.
(19:56):
People felt good supporting a company that they saw as
helping the union, and they started to buy the full
size version of the game to play at home. This
was also a way that they knew that the members
of their family who were engaged in combat were playing
the same game they were playing. It fostered this sense
of connectedness. So Milton Bradley had figured out how to
(20:16):
reconcile his concerns over making amusements during wartime with the
recognition of people actually needing such things just at those times,
and he had also managed to ensure the help of
his business in the process. So it was a little
bit early in the structure of the episode, but in
the interest of keeping this last part of it all together,
we are going to talk more about the Checkered Game
(20:39):
of Life and its legacy after we pause for a
sponsor break. So we promised we would talk about the
Checkered Game of Life because we haven't described it in
great detail yet. And the board for the Checkered Game
(20:59):
of Life is surprise. It looks like a checkerboard sort of,
but the boxes have things printed on them. So players
start at one corner of the board it's the lower
left if you're looking at the board with the printing
oriented correctly for reading, and then they work their way
to the top right corner. Obviously, of multiple people are
playing around aboard, they're not only going to have that
same perspective this game. If you've ever played the Game
(21:22):
of Life as it exists today, this is far darker
than it's modern reimagining, which is just called the Game
of Life. In the eighteen sixty version, you could land
on squares that were extremely dire sounding, including one that
read suicide that would end the game for you. Most
of the places you could land required some sort of
moral decision, so you could get points from virtuous squares,
(21:44):
and if you rack up enough points, you win, whether
or not you reach the end objective of a happy
old age or not. It's not one where you get
cash or anything. You only get points, and it's also
interestingly enough to me almost impossible to win if you're
playing this and you choose the path of politics. And
it seems in some ways like Milton Bradley's own life
(22:06):
experience and often shifting fortunes, informed some of the ways
things could play out in this game. As explained in
the rules quote, it will be seen that poverty lies
near the cradle. Now, in starting life, it is not
necessarily a fact that poverty will be a disadvantage, so
in the game it causes the player no loss to
(22:26):
pass through poverty. But if in more advanced age he
falls into intemperance and so thus carried to poverty, it
is only by constant and renewed exertion that the lost
ground can be regained. The same of disgrace, a person
may in early life be in disgrace for a time
(22:47):
through no fault of his own. But if, after having
had the advantages of experience, he falls through idleness to disgrace,
he will certainly need the helping hand of influence to
give him a fat office in order to start him
again in the world. This way, many ideas are suggested
by the peculiar arrangement of the several squares. Milton Bradley,
(23:11):
of course, patented the Checkered Game of Life, stating in
his patent application quote, be it known that I, Milton Bradley,
of Springfield, in the County of Hampton and the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, have invented a new social game. And he
goes on to describe the game's workings. The player having
the first move twirls the teetotem, and the number remaining
(23:31):
uppermost when the teetotem stops indicates what his move shall
be according to the description of moves on the record dials.
He accordingly enters his counter at infancy and from there
makes his first move Immediately. This leaves the square called
infancy vacant for the next player to the left, who
now twirls the teetotem and entering at infancy, makes the
(23:53):
move designated. Thus, each player in turn twirls the teetotem
and moves accordingly. When a counter moved to a square
having a hand on it, directions will be found on
that square, carrying it to another, the position of which
on the board is indicated by the index or hand
pointing to it. Thus, a counter can never stop on
(24:13):
a square having a hand on it. The account of
the game is very conveniently kept on the record dial
by the rotary brass pointer. Thus, when a player moves
onto a square containing five, turn the pointer to five,
and if onto another containing ten, to fifteen, and so on.
Any player who reaches happy old age gains fifty, which
(24:35):
is added to his amount. But as the winner must
gain one hundred, the game is not concluded until someone
has obtained that amount. As happy old age is surrounded
by many difficulties, fifty may oftentimes be gained as soon
by a succession of smaller numbers as by striving for
happy old age. And again he summed up with that
(24:55):
line that we mentioned earlier, which I love enough that
I thought it bears repeating. The journey of life is
governed by a combination of chance and judgment. But though
he didn't credit anyone else in the patents, the game
wasn't entirely original. It might be better to say it
was a new version of a game type that had
been around for hundreds of years. Spiral race games, that's
(25:18):
games in which players progress along a spiral path on
a board as they race to complete the goal, have
been around for a really long time. According to a
New Yorker article by Jill Lapour written in two thousand
and seven, the oldest spiral game might be an Arabic
one called the Hyena game. In it, pebbles represent the
(25:39):
player's mothers, and they have to follow a spiral track
to a central point where a task is completed, and
then return home before they become victims of a hyaena.
That sounds kind of like a fun game. That one
it sounds like, is like not obviously, it is old
enough that it is not necessarily on a printed game board,
but it's one where you can draw a by roll
(26:01):
in the sand and then use that as your game board.
In seventeen ninety a board game appeared in London shops
that was called The New Game of Human Life, and
this was a map board that advanced players from being
an infant to status as immortal by taking them a
long life's journey with possible pitfalls of temptation and options
(26:21):
to choose virtuous acts. So that sounds quite familiar. In
less than a decade, the New Game of Human Life
had spread to North America and it was suggested to
parents on both sides of the Atlantic as a good
way to teach children about morality, and this was followed
by other similar English games, the Mansion of Bliss and
The Mansion of Happiness being two primary ones. Both of
(26:44):
those games end with a winner getting into heaven. The
Mansion of Happiness was pretty popular in the US in
the first half and early middle of the nineteenth century,
so not long at all before Milton Bradley's version popped up.
Whether or not he was familiar with these other specific
games is unclear, but here's what I love if he
did know about them. What's really interesting is the way
(27:06):
that he shifted the theming of the game from their approach.
So The Mansion of Happiness is very obviously a game
about Christian morality. The goal is to secure a place
in heaven through gameplay, but in Bradley's version, although the
morality of it is very similar and it's very much
about doing what's right, the theming is secular. If you
(27:27):
live a good life you will get to happy old
age instead of any kind of religious immortality goal. As
Bradley had steered his company through the Civil War years,
he'd also hired other people to run the lithograph press,
so his time was freed up to work on other
projects while the Checkered Game of Life kept a steady
stream of revenue coming in. This resulted in a lot
(27:49):
more games. One of his most popular was a croquet
set that was small enough to be set up on
a tabletop. This came out just as the US was
embracing croquet, so unlike some of his earlier ventures, the
timing was just right. Yeah, there are some people who
credit him with popularizing croquet. I found ads for his
(28:09):
croquet set as early as eighteen sixty six, and somewhere
between eighteen sixty six and eighteen sixty eight is kind
of designated as the time that the US got really
excited about croquet, so certainly he may have been part
of making it making it available to everyone. On a
sadder note, in eighteen sixty six, Milton's wife, Violona, hosted
(28:29):
a birthday party for her husband, and while that party
was going on, he noticed that she was less energetic
than usual, and she continued to have less of her
usual spirit over the next couple of weeks, and Milton
became concerned and had a doctor come to the house,
and Violona was deemed just to need rest and you know,
to drink tonics, and she took it very easy, but
(28:50):
her symptoms got worse and she died on March thirteenth
of eighteen sixty seven. They did not have kids, and
Milton did not want to live alone, so he asked
his parents to move in with him after Violuna's passing,
which they did. His father actually started working with him
at the company, and during this time he threw himself
into work and developed a great number of things, including
(29:11):
a zootrope. In August eighteen sixty eight, Milton met a
young woman named Ellen Thayer, who went by Nelly through
his friend George and George's wife Mary Elizabeth. In the
year and a half since Bylona's death, Milton had seemed
to avoid the company of women entirely, but when he
met Nelly, they talked late into the night. He really
(29:33):
adored her, and so did his parents, and they were
engaged just a few months later. They married the following spring,
on May twenty first, eighteen sixty nine. They had two daughters,
Florence and Lillian Alice. In eighteen sixty nine, as the
newlywed Bradley was several years into what had become a
successful business, he went to a talk given by educator
(29:54):
and transcendentalists Emily Palmer Peabody. And In this talk, Peabody,
who today is known pri smarily as a person who
opened the first English language kindergarten in the US, talked
about early childhood education and the work of German education
reformer Friedrich Froebel, and Milton Bradley was a very receptive
listener to all of this, and he found the ideas
(30:15):
advocated by Froebel and in turn Peabody for children to
learn through activity and play just very inspiring. Two actions
on Bradley's part came out of this experience. One, he
offered to publish a book that outlined all these educational ideas. Two,
he decided that his company would manufacture and provide as
(30:36):
gifts educational materials that would supplement classrooms that used the
educational concepts of play. This was a really important development
in education in the United States because the idea of
an early educational classroom filled with brightly colored toys was
just not something that really existed. So working with educators,
(30:57):
Milton Bradley helped usher in the populace of kindergarten. So
it's an unpopular endeavor with a lot of Bradley's business partners.
The company was not experiencing the same robust sales that
it once had. Their margins were really thin. Their president
was doing research and development on educational materials instead of
(31:18):
new social games. In eighteen seventy eight, two of his
partners left, and George Tapley bought out their interests. Bradley
is said to have continued good relationships with everyone involved,
even though they did not share his vision regarding the
importance of early education. From eighteen sixty nine on, Bradley
(31:39):
was focused almost exclusively on inventing and patenting educational tools.
He made crayons and school grade watercolor sets and construction
paper packets, so a lot of the things that many
of us associate with the playful and artistic parts of
our childhood classroom experiences were shaped in part by Milton
Bradley's determination to give the kind movement solid footing. In
(32:02):
the United States. He invented a kindergarten table in the
eighteen eighties, and one of Milton Bradley's designers, Cornelius Hastings,
was responsible for the invention of the one armed paper
cutter that is so often used in classrooms and now
in crafting in other places, but I have such memories
of it in my elementary school classrooms. Those big, giant,
(32:23):
heavy Oh I love those things. They're very satisfying, also
a little scary sometimes. Yes, I don't know that they're
great for kindergarteners, but they're certainly efficient at cutting big
chunks of paper. One of the gift items that Bradley
had made for Elizabeth Peabody's effort was a set of blocks.
So normally these kinds of blocks would just be bright,
(32:44):
solid colors to encourage imaginative play. But Milton had decided
to put letters on the blocks, and this was something
that Elizabeth Peabotty was apparently really angry about, and they
were very good friends, but they got into quite a
big fight about it because she thought that directing the
kids too much. But Bradley made the blocks, so he
got his way, and now we think of blocks with
(33:07):
letters on them as very standard from an early age.
And the thing was, as he was developing gifts for
peabd he also started offering them at retail, and soon
other companies were also trying to get into the market
of learning toys and school supplies. To retain his standing
in the school market, Bradley acquired The Kindergarten News in
eighteen ninety three, and he started publishing it directly through
(33:30):
the company. In nineteen oh seven, Milton Bradley, having run
the Milton Bradley Company for forty seven years, retired. He
let the younger executives take the reins. Milton Bradley died
in May of nineteen eleven after a very brief and
sudden illness. Yeah, it was one of those things. In
one biography I read it sounded like he went for
(33:51):
a car ride with his wife, they had a great time.
The next day he didn't feel good, and something like
forty eight hours later he had passed. It was very,
very quick. In nineteen sixty, the Milton Bradley Company celebrated
its one hundred year anniversary by developing a modernized version
of the Checkered Game of Life. And this one is
probably much more familiar to anyone listening. It is the
(34:11):
Game of Life, and it shifted to use that spiral
path method that we're all familiar with now. But unlike
the eighteen sixty version, which focused so much on morality,
the mid twentieth century life was about financial prosperity. The
Milton Bradley Company was acquired by Hasbro in nineteen ninety two.
Many Milton Bradley games continue to be produced, including classics
(34:33):
like Candyland, Access and Allies, Battleship, Connect for Operation and Twister.
In two thousand and seven, the Game of Life Twists
and Turns was introduced, and that offered players a much
more flexible approach to play. It was not so much
about a goal but racking up points and money. In
twenty ten, the Game of Life was inducted into the
(34:54):
National Toy Hall of Fame. The Game of Life, Yeah,
which we'll talk about on Friday, and I will make
confessions that make me sound like a monster. Okay, So
I have listener mail. This is one of those listener mails.
This one has everything. Our listener Sheila, who writes, Hi,
(35:19):
I discovered your podcast last year and I've been hooked
ever since. I shared it with my husband and now
Stuff you Missed in History Class is the only podcast
my husband listens to. I am an artist and I
absolutely love when your podcasts relate to art history. Don't
be shy sharing that art. Sheila also makes a suggestion
for a podcast topic which is somebody I would like
(35:41):
to talk about, and also mentions that they're having a
hard time figuring out how to search episodes. This is
a problem we have run into for a long time.
We used to have a more searchable situation. I think
our usual advice if you do a search just online,
not on any of our players, for stuff you missed
in history class and a subject, you're more than likely
(36:03):
to find it, versus trying to look through a player
in search, which I always have trouble with. I would
say even that is less. It's not as accurate as
it used to be. Yeah, and that is I use
Google as my search engine, and that is changes to
the Google algorithm, not anything that's really within our control,
(36:24):
I don't think. But yeah, some of the individual podcast apps,
various ones are kind of searchable by episodes. Ours, the
iHeart Radio app not really searchable by episode. Yeah, it's
kind of a it's a little bit tricky, so apologies.
There's not a ton we can do about it, but
(36:45):
we hear you and feel you. And then here's the
important part. Photos. Yeah, she listened a lot of good photos.
The two parakeets are Ren and Stimpy, which is endurable
and also like appeals to my love of animation. We
adopted them, Sheila says, from a bird rescue. And then
(37:06):
another dog of my dreams. Here is our Akita, Emma
with Santa. I love Akita's so desperately. I can't even
if you don't know what an aikita is. It's a
big Japanese, gorgeous, fluffy dog and I love them. Emma
was adopted from a shelter last year, and she is,
according to Sheila, a gentle giant and then finally the
(37:27):
one who rules it all. Their torty Jazzy and Sheila,
because she is an artist, also shared one of her
watercolor and ink paintings. It is of a bird and
it is beautiful. So this hits all of my stuff.
We got dogs, we got birds, we got art. Sheila,
thank you, what a delay. And that Akita is with Santa,
(37:48):
who we also love, so thank you, thank you, thank you.
And this Torty has what I call torty face. No,
she will sass you, I can tell. She will tell
you how to do the dishes, how to dress, and
how to touch her very specifically, and how much to
feed her every day. Listen, I know I love it Toordy.
(38:11):
Thank you so much, Shela. This was such a delightful
email and so full of visual wonders that made me
smile over and over and over. So I really appreciate it.
Thank you for sharing your art with me. It's so beautiful.
I love it. I love birds. So we're all good.
If you would like to write to us and share
a million pictures of things that will make us grin,
or just to talk about something on the show, or
pictures so maybe it won't make us grin but are important,
(38:34):
you can do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History, and if you have not subscribed, you can
do that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(38:57):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye,
and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy Milton Bradley has been
on my list for a little minute. I think that
came up when we were talking about wig aboards. Maybe
(00:23):
maybe I haven't revisited that that Outlinington to refresh, but
he comes up periodic. He's just bumped up against a
lot of stuff that I have been looking at lately,
and most recently, when I was looking at inventors, his
name kept popping up, even though he wasn't directly related
to anything that we've talked about. And I like him
(00:43):
because he's a good one that does not spoiler alert
appear to have been a monster, which is always a refresher,
although he certainly could get obsessed with things that other
people didn't agree with. But he did contribute to a
lot of fun, although he believed in very moral fun,
which kind of tickles me a little bit. So I
don't think it's an overreach to say that he has
(01:05):
shaped not only the way people in the US and
around the globe play, but also in surprising ways if
you don't know his life story, he also shaped how
a lot of us have been educated in our youngest years.
And so I think that merits a little chat. Yeah,
seems like a good reason to me. Milton Bradley was
(01:26):
born November eighth, eighteen thirty six, in Vienna, Maine. The
Bradleys were really not well off. Lewis Bradley, Milton's father
was a craftsman. His mother was Fanny Leiford Bradley. Milton
was their only child. Lewis worked in a lot of
different jobs as a farm hand, in carpentry, handyman work,
(01:47):
odd jobs of just about any kind. In the mid
eighteen forties, he learned how to make starch from potatoes
and started a company to sell this starch. But then
there was a potato blight which ruined that plan and
left the Bradley family with almost nothing. Really, all their
savings had been invested in equipment for the potato processing.
(02:09):
A lack of income led to a change of locations,
so when Milton was eleven, the family moved to Luwell, Massachusetts,
where there was mill work. Yes, in an odd bit
of happenstance, this is yet another episode where a cotton
mill is featured because that is where his father worked.
Milton went to Lowell School, his primary school and his
(02:30):
high school, and he was particularly good at math and
science as a student, but he was also very interested
in and fairly skilled at art, specifically drawing, with no
real outlet for that through the school system, So after
he graduated, he got work in a draftsman's office, you know,
as a very low level office boy essentially, and then
(02:50):
he also sold stationery to residents of boarding houses as
a side job so that he could save up some money.
And the reason he was trying to sock away money
is because because he wanted tuition funds because in eighteen
fifty four he enrolled at Lawrence Scientific School. That school
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, eventually became part of Harvard. Bradley lived
(03:12):
at home while he was going to school so he
could stretch his savings. Was just a few hundred dollars.
That meant his commute was just under thirty miles each
way to and from school. This would have been a
pretty arduous schedule of long days for any commuter. It
was really the only way that this was going to work, though.
(03:33):
Following work where Lewis Bradley could find it. Milton's parents
made another move, this time to Hartford, Connecticut, and that
was two years into his college education, and this caused
a little problem because Milton could not afford to move
out on his own, so he had to move with
his parents just six months shy of finishing his studies.
(03:53):
But then at nineteen Milton decided he needed to earn
a living and make his own way, and so he
moved not far away from there to Springfield, Massachusetts, and
that is where he got his first job. The way
he got that job sounds a little unbelievable. You really
could not do this today. He marched into the offices
of the Wasson Locomotive car Works in Springfield and asked
(04:14):
if they had a draftsman. The person he spoke to
said that they did not, and Bradley offered himself as
one and was hired on the spot at the rate
of a dollar and twenty five cents a day. According
to his diary recollection of the event, Bradley had been
clear when he was asked he didn't have any practical
experience in this, and when he was questioned as to
(04:36):
whether he could draw a locomotive He said, I never have,
but I think I could. I feel like just show
up someplace and ask for a job. As like bad
job advice from yeah, I mean it's ongoing bad job advice,
but like also having no experience whatsoever is it makes
it a whole other level. Bradley left the office and
(04:58):
found himself a room at a house, and it probably
seemed like the start of great things for him. But
Wasson had financial problems and just a year into Bradley's
time there, this firm closed. I mean, to his credit,
he was right, he could. He actually turned out to
be a pretty good draftsman, and he had some experience
(05:19):
in an office, just not drawing trains. Bradley was, ever
trying to find ways to generate income. In eighteen fifty eight,
after the closing of the Locomotive car Works, he started
running ads in a variety of papers in the Massachusetts
area that read Bradley's Mechanical and Mathematical Institute. The subscriber,
formerly draftsman for the Springfield Locomotive Works, is now prepared
(05:42):
to give practical instruction in mechanical drawing in all its
branches viz. Detail working drawings, in plans, elevations and sections,
line and brushshading, coloring, geometrical projection, linear perspective, et cetera,
et cetera. Drawing instruments furnished at importers prices, Particular attention
(06:03):
given to working drawings of new machinery, also to patent
office drawings and specifications. During this early phase of being
in business for himself, Milton met a young woman named
by LOONA Eaton and they started a courtship, but Milton
knew he could not marry her unless he had money
coming in, and he was really not drumming up any
(06:25):
business at all at first, But then wast And Locomotive
had a commission to start production of train cars again
in eighteen fifty eight from a surprising client, which was Egypt.
The Alexandria and Cairo Railroad needed cars and the plant
was back up and running. Milton was contracted by Wasson
(06:46):
to draft drawings of the cars to be shipped along
with the cars themselves, so the workers who unpacked them
understood exactly how everything worked and should look. Bradley made
a nice sum of money from this commission, and he
planned to use it by purchasing equipment for his new company.
He also bought a desk for his mother and a
(07:06):
ring for Filona. As part of this. Bradley had developed
an interest in lithographs because they had sent him a
lithograph of one of his drawings of the train car,
and he started to realize this was a potential business enterprise.
There were not many lithograph presses around at this time.
The closest one to Springfield was in Boston that was
(07:27):
about ninety miles away. So Bradley thought that if he
could offer lithograph printing, he'd be the only one for
quite a distance and he might be able to carve
out kind of a niche industry for himself. And when
he reached out to an old friend from Lowell who
was named George Tapley, who will come up a lot
in his life story about buying a lithograph press from
the firm that Tapley worked at in Providence, Rhode Island,
(07:49):
Milton Bradley was invited to come and see one. He did,
and he bought it, and over the course of a
two week stay he learned how it worked. He brought
that press back to Field and set up his shop
as a lithographer and publisher, taking down the previous sign
that touted his services as a mechanical draftsman and patent solicitor.
(08:10):
And his first commission was working on a design showcase
book for a monument maker, and then soon he stayed
pretty constantly busy with orders. More bad fortune was on
the way for Bradley, though, as the United States was
embroiled in the growing conflict that would eventually become the
Civil War, he did not have any clients lining up
(08:30):
for the use of his printing services. But as the
press sat unused, Milton Bradley brainstormed other ways to try
to bring in money, and he finally came up with
something that would make him a household name. So that
big turning moment in Milton Bradley's business life came when
he produced a board game called The Checkered Game of Life.
(08:52):
This game debuted in eighteen sixty, but it is unclear
where the idea for it came from. So there's a
book called The Milton Bradley Story, which is a print
version of a nineteen seventy three lecture given by James J.
Shay Junior, who was president of the Milton Bradley Company
at the time, and in that lecture he describes this
(09:12):
moment this way quote, Milton Bradley's press stood idle and
bankruptcy threatened. It was during this period that an inventor
came to him with a game called the Checkered Game
of Life. Mister Bradley seized upon this opportunity and produced
and sold forty five thousand copies of the game the
first year. So that raised my eyebrow, because who is
(09:33):
this inventor who seems to have been cut out of
this whole thing. But it also seems like this account
might have been based on a misunderstanding of the actual events.
In a version written by James J. Shay Senior thirteen
years before his son's speech, he stated that Milton's old
friend George Tapley, had visited Bradley when the young entrepreneur
(09:54):
was feeling dejected and stressed about money, and Tapley, who
had his own problem but was overall and optimist, suggested
that they play a game. And according to the older account,
this evening of play of an unnamed but old English
board game inspired Milton Bradley to invent a game that
he could print himself on his lithograph press. Tapley, like Bradley,
(10:19):
was out of work. But it's possible that because he
had been an associate of Bradley's and had some business
connections with him, this may have just been a case
of sort of misspoken details. Yeah, how Tapley maybe got
characterized as another inventor in that seventy three speech may
have been because of that. But it does appear that
(10:40):
Milton Bradley did not steal this idea from anyone. Coming up,
we are going to talk about how that inspiration, though
wherever it came from, led to Milton Bradley very carefully
and thoughtfully crafting his first game. But first we're going
to hear from the sponsors that support the show. Milton
(11:06):
Bradley worked really hard to design this first game, and
he play tested it with his friend George Tapley, and
then he worked very hard to actually produce it because
in addition to the printing that needed to be done
to produce the board, there was also the need to
package it in a way that made sense and made
it attractive to prospective buyers. This was, of course, well
before machinery that automated the cutting, labeling, or packing of
(11:29):
game boxes, and what packaging machinery there was would have
been way out of Milton Bradley's access. Those were all
things that Bradley had to do by hand, initially with
one assistant to help him. And after they had assembled
several hundred units of the game, which apparently took many
six day a week work weeks that were twelve plus
hours a day, Bradley packed all of these up and
(11:51):
went with them to New York, planning to go store
to store on cold calls, just seeing if anyone wanted
to stock this new game that he had gone. He
asked for fifty cents per unit, but he wrote in
his diary that he honestly didn't have any idea what
retailers might charge for them. It was kind of like,
I don't know what my invention's worth, but here's where
I priced it, knowing a number of people who are
(12:15):
board game developers and how much time it often takes
to just like mock up one prototype of their game,
not even with a box to ship it in or
any of that laborious. Yes, in two days, Milton was
out of stock. Stores had been pretty enthusiastic about stocking
a game that seemed like a fun way to play
(12:37):
act through life and teach kids morality along the way,
Because that was the intention of Bradley's design. The game
manual instructions expounded on its inherent morality quote. This game represents,
as indicated by the name, the Checkered Journey of Life,
and is intended to present the various vices and virtues
(13:00):
in their natural relation to each other, the whole being
embodied in an attractive and entertaining amusement well calculated to
interest youth or adults. Each player, represented by his counter
or man, starts in the cradle or infancy and endeavors
to reach happy old age by the best course he
(13:21):
can select, striving not gain on his journey that which
shall make him the most prosperous, and to shun that
which will retard him in his progress. The journey of
life is governed by a combination of chance and judgment,
the chance representing the circumstance in life over which we
apparently have no control, but which are nevertheless governed to
(13:44):
a great extent by the voluntary actions of our past lives.
So in the game, the player oftentimes has choice of
a number of moves which he can make to more
or less apparent advantage, and at other times circumstances compel
him to pursue a course greatly to his disadvantage. But
any such necessity can generally be traced to some a
(14:07):
false move made in the former part of the game,
the effects of which could not be foreseen. You have
to live your life right or you will lose. You
brought this on yourself, Holly. The success of Bradley's first
trip to New York gave him the confidence to finally
set a date and get married to his fiancee, and
(14:29):
he and Viilona were wed on November eighth, eighteen sixty.
That was the same day that Milton turned twenty four,
so he was still a very young man as he
was doing all of this. All of this happened alongside
another event from Bradley's life that seems like it would
lead to wealth, but then hit a stumbling block. His
next business venture with the press was making mass market
(14:51):
prints of a photograph of then Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln.
This probably seemed like a sure fire away to make
money Bradley, he seemed to think, so he printed several
hundred thousand of the photos, and they probably would have
been lucrative were it not for just a bad bit
of luck. In the time between sitting for the photo
(15:13):
that Milton Bradley used as the basis for the Prince
and the time that the election was over, Lincoln's appearance changed.
This is a little bit of a side story, but
I wanted to do included because I found it so charming.
The decision on Lincoln's part to grow a beard came,
it seems, from an exchange that he had with a
girl named Grace Bedell, who was an eleven year old
(15:35):
from New York. Grace wrote the candidate Lincoln a letter
in which she said, quote, I have got four brothers,
and a part of them will vote for you anyway,
and if you will let your whiskers grow, I will
try and get the rest of them to vote for
you. You would look a great deal better, for your face
is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, and they
would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then
(15:57):
you would be president. This is like so political logic.
Although the return letter that Lincoln wrote to Grace pondered
whether people might think his having a beard after he
did not would be a silly affectation, he did grow
one in the months that followed. And then Lincoln met
Grace Biddell in early eighteen sixty one when he was
(16:19):
in New York, and he allegedly told her that he
had grown his whiskers just for her. Just probably not true,
but it is. He did tell her that it is
probably not the reason he did it, but it is
a very sweet story. Yeah. Yeah, I like the part
of having an incredibly contentious and impactful election boiled down
(16:40):
to whether he had a beard. Yeah, grow your whiskers. Yeah.
Once the president was headed to his inauguration, he was
no longer the clean shaven man in Bradley's souvenir photos
Bradley's remaining prince were worthless. Lincoln looked so different with
a beard than he did clean shaven that nobody wanted
to buy these. He wound up destroying the stock. There
(17:03):
are you can find pictures of that original print, and
it is I mean, I think most of us at
this point have probably seen pictures of Abraham Lincoln with
and without beard, and he does look so very different.
I could see why at the time you will be like,
I don't know, is that him? I also, I am
not a person who would buy a picture of the president. No,
(17:24):
me either, but you know, they didn't have streaming services.
Then they had to do whatever kept their lives entertained.
So Bradley had sort of put the checkered Game of
Life aside while he focused on this souvenir Lincoln portrait project.
He did get occasional orders for his board game, but
though they had initially been very, very exuberantly received, it
(17:46):
kind of slowed to a trickle, and then about the
time he was feeling really anxious about money and his
tanked photoplan and his lack of continued interest in his game,
the gaming business started to actually pick up. But then
the Civil War began and Bradley thought it was just
not the time for fun amusements. It kind of seemed
in bad taste for him to be marketing a game,
(18:09):
and early on in the conflict, he was also asked
by the superintendent of the Union Army armory to work
once again as a draftsman, drawing up plans for a
new rifle, and Bradley also wanted to enlist with the Union,
but he was told that his skills as a draftsman
were too valuable. The line that comes up in the
biographies of him, is this superintendent saying a lot of
(18:32):
men can shoot a gun and go to war, but
they can't all draw. When Milton saw a battalion of
soldiers camped in Springfield, he was, per his account, struck
by the vacant looks on their faces as they stood
or sat around campfires. He worried that their downtime had
nothing to fill it, so they were stuck in a
(18:53):
cycle of active conflict, training for conflict, or dread of conflict.
And he got the idea that maybe his game invention
would actually help the war effort. So in the hours
he wasn't working on drawings for the armory, he started
designing compact game kits. He knew they had to be
small and light. They could not weigh down or hinder
(19:14):
a soldier in any way. He started handing out the
game kits once they were finished, and they included pasteboard
versions of Chess, Checkers, backgammon, several different dominoes games, and
the Checkered Game of Life. And then he also started
to offer these compact game kits for sale. They were
one dollar per kit. He wasn't selling them to soldiers,
(19:34):
he would sell them to stores and they could resell them,
or they could donate them to the army. And charity
organizations also started buying them in bulk to give out
to soldiers, and soon they'll order rate really skyrocketed, and
this had the interesting secondary effect of also kickstarting a
new level of interest in the original Checkered Game of Life.
(19:56):
People felt good supporting a company that they saw as
helping the union, and they started to buy the full
size version of the game to play at home. This
was also a way that they knew that the members
of their family who were engaged in combat were playing
the same game they were playing. It fostered this sense
of connectedness. So Milton Bradley had figured out how to
(20:16):
reconcile his concerns over making amusements during wartime with the
recognition of people actually needing such things just at those times,
and he had also managed to ensure the help of
his business in the process. So it was a little
bit early in the structure of the episode, but in
the interest of keeping this last part of it all together,
we are going to talk more about the Checkered Game
(20:39):
of Life and its legacy after we pause for a
sponsor break. So we promised we would talk about the
Checkered Game of Life because we haven't described it in
great detail yet. And the board for the Checkered Game
(20:59):
of Life is surprise. It looks like a checkerboard sort of,
but the boxes have things printed on them. So players
start at one corner of the board it's the lower
left if you're looking at the board with the printing
oriented correctly for reading, and then they work their way
to the top right corner. Obviously, of multiple people are
playing around aboard, they're not only going to have that
same perspective this game. If you've ever played the Game
(21:22):
of Life as it exists today, this is far darker
than it's modern reimagining, which is just called the Game
of Life. In the eighteen sixty version, you could land
on squares that were extremely dire sounding, including one that
read suicide that would end the game for you. Most
of the places you could land required some sort of
moral decision, so you could get points from virtuous squares,
(21:44):
and if you rack up enough points, you win, whether
or not you reach the end objective of a happy
old age or not. It's not one where you get
cash or anything. You only get points, and it's also
interestingly enough to me almost impossible to win if you're
playing this and you choose the path of politics. And
it seems in some ways like Milton Bradley's own life
(22:06):
experience and often shifting fortunes, informed some of the ways
things could play out in this game. As explained in
the rules quote, it will be seen that poverty lies
near the cradle. Now, in starting life, it is not
necessarily a fact that poverty will be a disadvantage, so
in the game it causes the player no loss to
(22:26):
pass through poverty. But if in more advanced age he
falls into intemperance and so thus carried to poverty, it
is only by constant and renewed exertion that the lost
ground can be regained. The same of disgrace, a person
may in early life be in disgrace for a time
(22:47):
through no fault of his own. But if, after having
had the advantages of experience, he falls through idleness to disgrace,
he will certainly need the helping hand of influence to
give him a fat office in order to start him
again in the world. This way, many ideas are suggested
by the peculiar arrangement of the several squares. Milton Bradley,
(23:11):
of course, patented the Checkered Game of Life, stating in
his patent application quote, be it known that I, Milton Bradley,
of Springfield, in the County of Hampton and the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, have invented a new social game. And he
goes on to describe the game's workings. The player having
the first move twirls the teetotem, and the number remaining
(23:31):
uppermost when the teetotem stops indicates what his move shall
be according to the description of moves on the record dials.
He accordingly enters his counter at infancy and from there
makes his first move Immediately. This leaves the square called
infancy vacant for the next player to the left, who
now twirls the teetotem and entering at infancy, makes the
(23:53):
move designated. Thus, each player in turn twirls the teetotem
and moves accordingly. When a counter moved to a square
having a hand on it, directions will be found on
that square, carrying it to another, the position of which
on the board is indicated by the index or hand
pointing to it. Thus, a counter can never stop on
(24:13):
a square having a hand on it. The account of
the game is very conveniently kept on the record dial
by the rotary brass pointer. Thus, when a player moves
onto a square containing five, turn the pointer to five,
and if onto another containing ten, to fifteen, and so on.
Any player who reaches happy old age gains fifty, which
(24:35):
is added to his amount. But as the winner must
gain one hundred, the game is not concluded until someone
has obtained that amount. As happy old age is surrounded
by many difficulties, fifty may oftentimes be gained as soon
by a succession of smaller numbers as by striving for
happy old age. And again he summed up with that
(24:55):
line that we mentioned earlier, which I love enough that
I thought it bears repeating. The journey of life is
governed by a combination of chance and judgment. But though
he didn't credit anyone else in the patents, the game
wasn't entirely original. It might be better to say it
was a new version of a game type that had
been around for hundreds of years. Spiral race games, that's
(25:18):
games in which players progress along a spiral path on
a board as they race to complete the goal, have
been around for a really long time. According to a
New Yorker article by Jill Lapour written in two thousand
and seven, the oldest spiral game might be an Arabic
one called the Hyena game. In it, pebbles represent the
(25:39):
player's mothers, and they have to follow a spiral track
to a central point where a task is completed, and
then return home before they become victims of a hyaena.
That sounds kind of like a fun game. That one
it sounds like, is like not obviously, it is old
enough that it is not necessarily on a printed game board,
but it's one where you can draw a by roll
(26:01):
in the sand and then use that as your game board.
In seventeen ninety a board game appeared in London shops
that was called The New Game of Human Life, and
this was a map board that advanced players from being
an infant to status as immortal by taking them a
long life's journey with possible pitfalls of temptation and options
(26:21):
to choose virtuous acts. So that sounds quite familiar. In
less than a decade, the New Game of Human Life
had spread to North America and it was suggested to
parents on both sides of the Atlantic as a good
way to teach children about morality, and this was followed
by other similar English games, the Mansion of Bliss and
The Mansion of Happiness being two primary ones. Both of
(26:44):
those games end with a winner getting into heaven. The
Mansion of Happiness was pretty popular in the US in
the first half and early middle of the nineteenth century,
so not long at all before Milton Bradley's version popped up.
Whether or not he was familiar with these other specific
games is unclear, but here's what I love if he
did know about them. What's really interesting is the way
(27:06):
that he shifted the theming of the game from their approach.
So The Mansion of Happiness is very obviously a game
about Christian morality. The goal is to secure a place
in heaven through gameplay, but in Bradley's version, although the
morality of it is very similar and it's very much
about doing what's right, the theming is secular. If you
(27:27):
live a good life you will get to happy old
age instead of any kind of religious immortality goal. As
Bradley had steered his company through the Civil War years,
he'd also hired other people to run the lithograph press,
so his time was freed up to work on other
projects while the Checkered Game of Life kept a steady
stream of revenue coming in. This resulted in a lot
(27:49):
more games. One of his most popular was a croquet
set that was small enough to be set up on
a tabletop. This came out just as the US was
embracing croquet, so unlike some of his earlier ventures, the
timing was just right. Yeah, there are some people who
credit him with popularizing croquet. I found ads for his
(28:09):
croquet set as early as eighteen sixty six, and somewhere
between eighteen sixty six and eighteen sixty eight is kind
of designated as the time that the US got really
excited about croquet, so certainly he may have been part
of making it making it available to everyone. On a
sadder note, in eighteen sixty six, Milton's wife, Violona, hosted
(28:29):
a birthday party for her husband, and while that party
was going on, he noticed that she was less energetic
than usual, and she continued to have less of her
usual spirit over the next couple of weeks, and Milton
became concerned and had a doctor come to the house,
and Violona was deemed just to need rest and you know,
to drink tonics, and she took it very easy, but
(28:50):
her symptoms got worse and she died on March thirteenth
of eighteen sixty seven. They did not have kids, and
Milton did not want to live alone, so he asked
his parents to move in with him after Violuna's passing,
which they did. His father actually started working with him
at the company, and during this time he threw himself
into work and developed a great number of things, including
(29:11):
a zootrope. In August eighteen sixty eight, Milton met a
young woman named Ellen Thayer, who went by Nelly through
his friend George and George's wife Mary Elizabeth. In the
year and a half since Bylona's death, Milton had seemed
to avoid the company of women entirely, but when he
met Nelly, they talked late into the night. He really
(29:33):
adored her, and so did his parents, and they were
engaged just a few months later. They married the following spring,
on May twenty first, eighteen sixty nine. They had two daughters,
Florence and Lillian Alice. In eighteen sixty nine, as the
newlywed Bradley was several years into what had become a
successful business, he went to a talk given by educator
(29:54):
and transcendentalists Emily Palmer Peabody. And In this talk, Peabody,
who today is known pri smarily as a person who
opened the first English language kindergarten in the US, talked
about early childhood education and the work of German education
reformer Friedrich Froebel, and Milton Bradley was a very receptive
listener to all of this, and he found the ideas
(30:15):
advocated by Froebel and in turn Peabody for children to
learn through activity and play just very inspiring. Two actions
on Bradley's part came out of this experience. One, he
offered to publish a book that outlined all these educational ideas. Two,
he decided that his company would manufacture and provide as
(30:36):
gifts educational materials that would supplement classrooms that used the
educational concepts of play. This was a really important development
in education in the United States because the idea of
an early educational classroom filled with brightly colored toys was
just not something that really existed. So working with educators,
(30:57):
Milton Bradley helped usher in the populace of kindergarten. So
it's an unpopular endeavor with a lot of Bradley's business partners.
The company was not experiencing the same robust sales that
it once had. Their margins were really thin. Their president
was doing research and development on educational materials instead of
(31:18):
new social games. In eighteen seventy eight, two of his
partners left, and George Tapley bought out their interests. Bradley
is said to have continued good relationships with everyone involved,
even though they did not share his vision regarding the
importance of early education. From eighteen sixty nine on, Bradley
(31:39):
was focused almost exclusively on inventing and patenting educational tools.
He made crayons and school grade watercolor sets and construction
paper packets, so a lot of the things that many
of us associate with the playful and artistic parts of
our childhood classroom experiences were shaped in part by Milton
Bradley's determination to give the kind movement solid footing. In
(32:02):
the United States. He invented a kindergarten table in the
eighteen eighties, and one of Milton Bradley's designers, Cornelius Hastings,
was responsible for the invention of the one armed paper
cutter that is so often used in classrooms and now
in crafting in other places, but I have such memories
of it in my elementary school classrooms. Those big, giant,
(32:23):
heavy Oh I love those things. They're very satisfying, also
a little scary sometimes. Yes, I don't know that they're
great for kindergarteners, but they're certainly efficient at cutting big
chunks of paper. One of the gift items that Bradley
had made for Elizabeth Peabody's effort was a set of blocks.
So normally these kinds of blocks would just be bright,
(32:44):
solid colors to encourage imaginative play. But Milton had decided
to put letters on the blocks, and this was something
that Elizabeth Peabotty was apparently really angry about, and they
were very good friends, but they got into quite a
big fight about it because she thought that directing the
kids too much. But Bradley made the blocks, so he
got his way, and now we think of blocks with
(33:07):
letters on them as very standard from an early age.
And the thing was, as he was developing gifts for
peabd he also started offering them at retail, and soon
other companies were also trying to get into the market
of learning toys and school supplies. To retain his standing
in the school market, Bradley acquired The Kindergarten News in
eighteen ninety three, and he started publishing it directly through
(33:30):
the company. In nineteen oh seven, Milton Bradley, having run
the Milton Bradley Company for forty seven years, retired. He
let the younger executives take the reins. Milton Bradley died
in May of nineteen eleven after a very brief and
sudden illness. Yeah, it was one of those things. In
one biography I read it sounded like he went for
(33:51):
a car ride with his wife, they had a great time.
The next day he didn't feel good, and something like
forty eight hours later he had passed. It was very,
very quick. In nineteen sixty, the Milton Bradley Company celebrated
its one hundred year anniversary by developing a modernized version
of the Checkered Game of Life. And this one is
probably much more familiar to anyone listening. It is the
(34:11):
Game of Life, and it shifted to use that spiral
path method that we're all familiar with now. But unlike
the eighteen sixty version, which focused so much on morality,
the mid twentieth century life was about financial prosperity. The
Milton Bradley Company was acquired by Hasbro in nineteen ninety two.
Many Milton Bradley games continue to be produced, including classics
(34:33):
like Candyland, Access and Allies, Battleship, Connect for Operation and Twister.
In two thousand and seven, the Game of Life Twists
and Turns was introduced, and that offered players a much
more flexible approach to play. It was not so much
about a goal but racking up points and money. In
twenty ten, the Game of Life was inducted into the
(34:54):
National Toy Hall of Fame. The Game of Life, Yeah,
which we'll talk about on Friday, and I will make
confessions that make me sound like a monster. Okay, So
I have listener mail. This is one of those listener mails.
This one has everything. Our listener Sheila, who writes, Hi,
(35:19):
I discovered your podcast last year and I've been hooked
ever since. I shared it with my husband and now
Stuff you Missed in History Class is the only podcast
my husband listens to. I am an artist and I
absolutely love when your podcasts relate to art history. Don't
be shy sharing that art. Sheila also makes a suggestion
for a podcast topic which is somebody I would like
(35:41):
to talk about, and also mentions that they're having a
hard time figuring out how to search episodes. This is
a problem we have run into for a long time.
We used to have a more searchable situation. I think
our usual advice if you do a search just online,
not on any of our players, for stuff you missed
in history class and a subject, you're more than likely
(36:03):
to find it, versus trying to look through a player
in search, which I always have trouble with. I would
say even that is less. It's not as accurate as
it used to be. Yeah, and that is I use
Google as my search engine, and that is changes to
the Google algorithm, not anything that's really within our control,
(36:24):
I don't think. But yeah, some of the individual podcast apps,
various ones are kind of searchable by episodes. Ours, the
iHeart Radio app not really searchable by episode. Yeah, it's
kind of a it's a little bit tricky, so apologies.
There's not a ton we can do about it, but
(36:45):
we hear you and feel you. And then here's the
important part. Photos. Yeah, she listened a lot of good photos.
The two parakeets are Ren and Stimpy, which is endurable
and also like appeals to my love of animation. We
adopted them, Sheila says, from a bird rescue. And then
(37:06):
another dog of my dreams. Here is our Akita, Emma
with Santa. I love Akita's so desperately. I can't even
if you don't know what an aikita is. It's a
big Japanese, gorgeous, fluffy dog and I love them. Emma
was adopted from a shelter last year, and she is,
according to Sheila, a gentle giant and then finally the
(37:27):
one who rules it all. Their torty Jazzy and Sheila,
because she is an artist, also shared one of her
watercolor and ink paintings. It is of a bird and
it is beautiful. So this hits all of my stuff.
We got dogs, we got birds, we got art. Sheila,
thank you, what a delay. And that Akita is with Santa,
(37:48):
who we also love, so thank you, thank you, thank you.
And this Torty has what I call torty face. No,
she will sass you, I can tell. She will tell
you how to do the dishes, how to dress, and
how to touch her very specifically, and how much to
feed her every day. Listen, I know I love it Toordy.
(38:11):
Thank you so much, Shela. This was such a delightful
email and so full of visual wonders that made me
smile over and over and over. So I really appreciate it.
Thank you for sharing your art with me. It's so beautiful.
I love it. I love birds. So we're all good.
If you would like to write to us and share
a million pictures of things that will make us grin,
or just to talk about something on the show, or
pictures so maybe it won't make us grin but are important,
(38:34):
you can do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History, and if you have not subscribed, you can
do that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(38:57):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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