Part IThe Story
A Likeness That Would Not Hold
Nobody wrote down where Milton Bradley burned the Lincolns. The accounts agree only that he did. The beardless faces of the Republican nominee for president, printed in color on the only lithograph machine in Massachusetts outside Boston, went into the fire by the stack. Some had sold. The rest had come back from customers who wanted their money returned because the man in the picture no longer looked like the man in the newspapers. Abraham Lincoln, a gaunt Illinois lawyer whom most Americans in the summer of 1860 could not have picked out of a crowd, had decided to grow whiskers. The most familiar version of the story credits an eleven-year-old girl who wrote to say his thin face would look better with a beard, and that "all the ladies like whiskers." Historians argue about how much the beard helped him. Nobody argues about what it did to a 23-year-old printer in Springfield.
A lithographer sells fidelity. He takes an image, a face or a railroad car or a trade card for a hardware store, and reproduces it exactly, in color, as many times as the stone and the press and the men running them will allow. The product is the guarantee that the copy matches the original. Bradley had executed his job perfectly. The original had moved.
There is a small, cruel joke at the end of this. Because so few of the prints sold, and because their maker destroyed most of what remained, the beardless Bradley Lincoln is now, in the words of the game historian Bruce Whitehill, "a valuable piece of ephemera." The failure became a collectible. The inventory he could not give away in 1860 would fetch real money at auction today, if anyone could find it.
What Bradley did next is the reason his name sat on American toy shelves for 149 years. It also complicates the story he is usually made to tell. The standard version is a parable of the pivot: failed printer burns stock, invents board game, founds empire. That is roughly true. But the man who emerges from the archive (the patents, the catalogs, the letters on company stationery, a guest book from a summer house in Maine) was not mainly a game designer. He was a draftsman obsessed with exactness, a devout New Englander who distrusted dice, an evangelist for a German theory of early childhood education that lost him money for decades, and a color theorist who wanted a schoolchild in Kansas and a schoolchild in Boston to mean the same thing when they said "orange." The game was the thing that paid for the rest. The rest was what he cared about.
He spent the remaining half century of his life making things that could not go out of date, or trying to. A game about life itself. A rulebook for croquet that would settle every lawn argument in the country. Six colors, fixed for the twentieth century. Paper coins so exact that the federal government eventually made him print the word "educational" across their faces. Almost all of it outlived him. Very little of it stayed the way he made it.
There is an inconvenience in the record worth admitting early. Not every source agrees that the Lincoln fiasco came first. One well-circulated company history, the kind written from corporate files, has Bradley inventing his board game, selling the first run in New York, and only then being "temporarily sidetracked" by a commission for the Lincoln portrait. The more common telling reverses the order and makes the beard the cause of everything. The order matters less than it seems. Either way, in the same year, Bradley learned two lessons in quick succession: a picture of the world can be rendered worthless overnight, and a picture of a life (abstract, moralized, laid out in squares) can sell forty-five thousand copies before the first shots at Fort Sumter.
By the Numbers
The Bradley Ledger
45,000+Copies of The Checkered Game of Life sold by spring 1861
$1Price of a Bradley game kit sold to Civil War soldiers
1,250Items in Bradley's school supplies and kindergarten catalog
6Pigments Bradley fixed as the standard for children's art supplies
410 → 150Game titles cut by the company during World War II
$350MHasbro's 1984 purchase price for the Milton Bradley Company
149Years the Milton Bradley name was in use, 1860–2009
Checkers, Yes. Dice, Never.
Lewis Bradley made potato starch. He was a carpenter by trade, and in Vienna, Maine, a Kennebec County town of farms and lakes where his family had settled from New Hampshire around 1800, he ran a small factory turning the region's potatoes into a commodity. Then the blight came in the early 1840s, the same rot that would empty Ireland, and the factory closed. In 1847 Lewis moved his wife, Fannie, and their only child to Lowell, Massachusetts, the mill city, and the family began the restless circuit around New England that would define the boy's adolescence. One children's biography counts five moves. The Bradleys went where the work was, and the work did not stay put.
Milton was born in the family's house in Vienna on November 8, 1836. The Vienna Historical Society, which now owns that house and has been repairing its foundation, gives the date as November 18. Nearly everyone else says the eighth. It is a fitting first discrepancy for a man whose life would be retold mostly in children's books, where details tend to soften.
The household was working-class, Christian, and affectionate in a particular New England register. The Bradleys disapproved of dancing, drinking, and gambling. They did not disapprove of games. Lewis and Fannie played chess and checkers with their son and read to him in the evenings. Lewis taught arithmetic with apples, putting the abstraction of number into something a child could hold, count, and eat. The distinction the family drew is easy to miss and central to everything that came later. A game of skill, like checkers, was an honorable way to spend an evening. A game of chance, governed by dice, belonged to the tavern and the gambling den. The line ran between the board and the bones.
The boy was good at mathematics and better at drawing. He finished high school in Lowell in 1854. One of his schoolmates there, by most accounts, was George Tapley, who would become his closest friend and, at two decisive moments, the man who kept his company alive. Tapley remains frustratingly faint in the record: a best friend, a host of evening games, a buyer of other men's shares, a donor of buildings, the father of a son who would one day run the firm. He is the sort of figure every founder story has and few founders acknowledge. He appears in the Bradley family's summer guest book, decades later, among the visitors from Springfield.
After high school Bradley found work as a draftsman and patent agent. This was precise and unglamorous work. A patent application lived or died by its drawings, which had to follow strict conventions, and the agent's job was to render other men's inventions so exactly that the Patent Office could not misunderstand them. The University of Maine's library has traced his hand to applications for a spinning flyer (No. 12,063), a machine for channeling and edging the soles of boots and shoes (No. 24,182), and a steam slide valve (No. 37,545). Before Bradley ever invented anything, he spent years making other people's inventions legible.
He enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School in Cambridge, Harvard's engineering annex, and paid his way by giving drawing lessons and selling stationery to his classmates. It lasted about a year. His parents moved again, this time to Hartford, Connecticut. Bradley followed, could not find work, and left the school without finishing. Later sources would sometimes describe him as "Harvard-educated." That is generous, though the education in selling things to the people around you was real enough.
There is a pattern here, compressed into the first twenty years: a father whose livelihood was erased by a blight nobody could have predicted, a family forever relocating toward opportunity, a son trained to draw machines with absolute fidelity. It rhymes with the Lincoln fire. Lewis Bradley's potato starch and Milton Bradley's lithographs went worthless for the same reason. The world changed after the goods were made.
The Cars for Egypt
In 1856, at nineteen, Bradley moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, the Connecticut River city of the federal armory and a fast-growing manufacturing base, and took a job as a mechanical draftsman with the Wason Car Manufacturing Company. Wason built railroad cars. Bradley drew them.
One of his commissions stands out in the record. It was an extravagant car built for the ruler of Egypt. In March 1858 the Vermont Press ran a notice headlined "The Cars for Egypt," and the design was well received. Bradley was given a color lithograph of the finished car as a gift. By several accounts, that print, a color reproduction of a drawing he had helped make, is what turned him toward lithography. It is a strange and specific origin. A young man looks at a picture of his own work, made in a medium he does not yet understand, and decides that the reproduction is more interesting than the thing reproduced.
Work slowed. Bradley lost his job. In 1859 he went to Providence, Rhode Island, to learn the trade, and in 1860 he came back to Springfield and opened a color lithography shop. Whitehill credits him with improvements to the process that made color images mass-producible, including the printed sheets that were pasted onto game boards and boxes. That technical detail turns out to matter a great deal. Bradley did not have to buy anyone's printing. He owned the means of making color pictures cheaply, which is to say he owned the most expensive input of a board game before he had thought of making one.
The machine was temperamental, and so were the men he hired to run it. Orders came in from Springfield businesses, but turning them into profit was harder. The company history written from the firm's files says he "began to search for new applications for his lithograph machine." That is the founding sentence of the American game industry, though it reads like a line from a quarterly memo. Bradley had a press and not enough to print on it.
Then came the Lincoln portrait, and the fire, and an evening at George Tapley's.
Sixty-Four Squares to Happy Old Age
Tapley challenged him to a game, probably an old English one. Some accounts say the board had been imported; one says a friend gave it to Bradley outright. Bradley played, and he came away with the thought that he could make something like it, only American.
What he made in the winter of 1860 was The Checkered Game of Life. The pun was the design brief. The board was a checkerboard of sixty-four squares, the familiar grid of his father's parlor, and "checkered" also meant a life of fluctuating fortune, good squares and bad squares alternating. Players began at Infancy. The squares carried moral weight, and they connected to one another with an Old Testament logic. Industry led to Wealth. Gambling led to Ruin. Intemperance led to Poverty. Bravery led up the board to Honor, and Idleness led down it to Disgrace. Even the safe positions were not safe. A square called "Fat Office," the nineteenth-century name for a comfortable sinecure, sat on a board that also held Prison, Ruin, and a square labeled, without euphemism, Suicide.
The object of the game was printed in the instructions with Victorian formality: "To gain on his journey that which shall make him the most prosperous, and to shun that which will retard him in his progress." Players earned points by landing on virtues. The first to reach one hundred won, even if a rival got to the square marked Happy Old Age first. That rule deserves a second look. The game held up Happy Old Age as the destination, then quietly awarded victory to whoever piled up the most along the way.
Then there was the matter of the dice. There weren't any. Bradley was, in the board game historian Tristan Donovan's phrase, "fairly devout," and he worried that his friends would frown on a game at all. Dice belonged to gamblers. So the player's fate was set by a teetotum, a small numbered top that you spun and let fall. A teetotum produces random numbers just as a die does. It differs in its associations, the parlor rather than the tavern. Bradley did not remove chance from his game. He removed what chance looked like. And because each player chose which direction to move once the top fell, he wrapped the randomness in the language of choice. Here was a Puritan's theology rendered in cardboard: Providence spins, and you are still responsible for where you step.
The scholar Jennifer Snyder, who wrote her dissertation on Bradley, described the man to Vox in 2015 in terms that fit the board exactly.
— Jennifer Snyder, art education scholar, to Vox (2015)He was a very religious man ... he seemed very interesting, but in some ways probably pretty rigid in terms of his view of what was appropriate or not.
Rigid is the right word for the board's morality. Prophetic is the right word for its incentives. American board games before 1860 had not paid off in prosperity. The Mansion of Happiness, published in 1843 by the brothers William and Stephen B. Ives and descended from the Renaissance Game of Goose, was a straightforward sermon in which virtue was rewarded, vice punished, and the prize was a heavenly mansion. Bradley's game kept the sermon's vocabulary and changed its arithmetic. Success was secular. Virtue mattered because it got you somewhere. The board did not promise salvation. It promised a hundred points. A later trade journal, Playthings, would call it the first game "with a purpose."
— Playthings magazine, as quoted by game historian Bruce WhitehillThe first game with a purpose (that) taught a lesson of success through integrity and right living.
Bradley spent weeks producing several hundred copies on his own press. Then he took them to New York himself. Selling it was the first test, and there was no layer between maker and market: one man, a few hundred boxes, the stationers and newsstands and department stores of Manhattan. He expected resistance. In two days the dealers took the entire stock. A game that doubled as a lesson in morals could be sold to parents who would never let a deck of cards into the house. The scruple was the selling point.
By the spring of 1861 more than forty-five thousand copies had sold. Some sources say forty thousand, others "more than forty thousand," and the Crane Museum, which holds an 1883 letter from Milton Bradley & Co. ordering "glazed bond paper thickness no. 29," settles on "over 40,000." The precise figure matters less than the ratio. A man who could not move a stack of Lincoln portraits had sold tens of thousands of copies of an abstraction. The portrait had been exact and went stale in months. The game was a crude diagram of human life, and it would still be in print, in some form, more than 160 years later.
He patented the design as a "Social game," U.S. Patent No. 53,561, issued April 3, 1866. In 2006, on the strength of that patent, he entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame. A Puritan's moral diagram, filed by a former patent agent who knew precisely how such drawings had to look.
A Dollar a Box
The war broke out that spring, and Bradley, like a good many men in an armory town, tried to make weapons. He produced sketches of armaments for local manufacturers. It went nowhere, and the gun-designing episode would barely merit a line if it did not lead directly to the second great insight of his career.
Springfield was full of soldiers, and the soldiers were bored. War is mostly waiting. Bradley saw them idling in camp and thought not about rifles but about the hours between drills. He made a kit: small, portable versions of chess, checkers, backgammon, dominoes, and The Checkered Game of Life, all packed into a box compact enough for a knapsack. They sold for a dollar apiece. Soldiers bought them individually. Charitable organizations bought them in bulk and shipped them to Union camps. These are generally regarded as the first travel games made in America.
It was a modest product with an immodest lesson. Bradley had found a customer who did not exist the year before, a young man far from home with a pocket of pay and nothing to do. He had found a second buyer, the charity, who would purchase on that customer's behalf for reasons of conscience. And he had found a format, the compact boxed assortment, that turned a single game into a product line. By 1864 the business was solid enough to incorporate and take on partners as Milton Bradley & Company.
The war years and the ones just after show a man trying everything his press and his drafting hand could reach. He made the Myriopticon, a boxed panorama viewer that rolled painted scenes of the Civil War past a small proscenium. History became entertainment, cranked by hand. He made zoetropes, slitted spinning drums that turned printed strips into the illusion of motion. He made the Historiscope, another moving panorama. He made a game called The Smashed-Up Locomotive, an odd title for a man who had once drawn railroad cars for an Egyptian ruler, and puzzles of wrecked vehicles that, the company history notes, were popular with young boys.
In 1866 he published Croquet: Its Principles and Rules, credited to a "Prof. A. Rover." It was a pseudonym, and the joke is good. Croquet had arrived from England and was spreading across American lawns faster than anyone could agree on how to play it. Bradley became the first American manufacturer of croquet sets, and he sold them with an authoritative rulebook. He had assembled the rules himself, by the company's account, from oral tradition and his own sense of fair play. The National Inventors Hall of Fame says the rules he set down are still used. Consider the position this gave him. Anyone could carve a mallet. Only one firm shipped the referee in the box.
This is the draftsman again, still making things legible. A croquet rulebook resembles a patent drawing: a precise rendering of something that existed loosely in many forms, fixed so that it could be reproduced. By 1876 his company was producing folding game boards at 18½ inches square, the size, Whitehill notes, that remains standard today. The obsession with exactness had found its commercial form. If you write the rules and set the dimensions, every competitor who follows is playing your game.
In 1860, the same year he founded the company and burned the Lincolns, Bradley married Vilona Eaton. They had no children. She died of tuberculosis on March 13, 1867. After her death his parents moved in with him, and Lewis Bradley, the potato-starch man, took a job at his son's company. The family that had followed work around New England for two decades finally stopped moving. Lewis would work for his son, and eventually live in his son's house, and be buried in his son's plot.
Papa, That's Just How You Taught Me
In 1869 Bradley married again. Ellen Thayer, called Nellie, was a schoolteacher. Not long after, she took her husband, and her father-in-law, to hear a lecture by Elizabeth Peabody.
Peabody deserves her own compressed portrait, because hers rhymes most closely with his. She was a Boston educator and reformer who had become the leading American apostle of Friedrich Froebel, the German who had invented the kindergarten. In 1860, the year of the Lincoln fire and The Checkered Game of Life, she opened the first English-speaking kindergarten in the United States. Froebel's idea was considered radical at the time. Young children did not learn best by memorizing facts and reciting numbers. They learned through structured creative play with simple objects, the geometric wooden blocks and balls and cylinders Froebel called "gifts," handled in a deliberate sequence. The theory cared about emotional and social development as well as intellectual drill. It treated play as the work of childhood.
Bradley sat through the lecture. Afterward, by the account preserved in the University of Maine's library guide, he turned to his father and said: "Papa! That's just how you taught me!"
The whole biography seems to turn on that sentence. Thirty years earlier, in a farmhouse in Kennebec County, a carpenter had taught his son arithmetic with apples. He had not known he was practicing pedagogy. He had simply done what came naturally to a patient father with a kitchen table and a quick child. Now a German theorist, by way of a Boston reformer, had given that kitchen table a name and a philosophy, and the son recognized his own childhood in it, with his father sitting beside him. The conversion was instant and lifelong. The scholar Clifton Ray Oakes, in a 1975 dissertation, dates Bradley's introduction to Froebel to 1868. The library guides say 1869. Either way, for the forty-odd years that remained to him, Bradley was a kindergarten man first.
He moved quickly. In 1869 his company published the first English edition of Edward Wiebe's Paradise of Childhood, a practical guide to Froebel's method. He began manufacturing the gifts, along with colored papers, paints, and the other materials a kindergarten needed. When Springfield got its first kindergarten, the first students were Milton Bradley's two daughters, Lillian and Florence. The first teachers were Milton, Nellie, and Lewis. Three generations of the same family, in one room, playing with blocks on purpose.
Here is the image the archive keeps returning to: a game company founder in his thirties on the floor with his own children and his aging father, teaching a German method of play in a Massachusetts town. He had built a fortune on a board that told adults virtue was a means to prosperity. Now he was putting that fortune into a classroom where play was simply good, an end in itself.
He did not, it should be said, stop making money from games. The company kept producing dozens of them and riding every fad that passed through the parlor. He just stopped thinking of them as the point.
Either the Kindergarten Goes, or We Go
The kindergarten business lost money. This is not an inference. Every account says so, and some say worse. Bradley gave materials away. He sold school supplies at margins that alarmed his partners. He launched two magazines, Kindergarten News (later Kindergarten Review) and Work and Play, and neither was profitable. He published them anyway until the end of his life. The University of Houston's Engines of Our Ingenuity put it plainly: "For decades, this component of Bradley's business lost money."
Then came the Long Depression, the slump that began with the Panic of 1873 and ground on through the decade. Bradley's investors issued an ultimatum that survives in nearly identical form in every source: either the kindergarten work goes, or they go.
He chose the kindergarten.
It is worth pausing on how strange this was. A man who had already watched one product line become worthless, who knew from the Lincoln fire exactly what dead inventory felt like, was now choosing to keep the unprofitable line and lose the investors who had capitalized his profitable one, in the middle of a depression. No spreadsheet in the world would have endorsed it. The decision only makes sense if you believe, as Bradley did, that the kindergarten line was the actual business, and the games existed to finance it.
George Tapley made the choice survivable. In 1874, by the University of Maine's account, Tapley bought out the dissenting shareholders and donated four of his own buildings to the company. He took over as president. The friend who had once challenged Bradley to a game in his parlor now owned enough of the firm to protect its founder from his own convictions. Whatever Tapley believed about Froebel, and the record does not say, he believed in Bradley. Some sources date a later restructuring to 1878, when Bradley is said to have bought out remaining partners, and the business was reorganized in 1884 under the name Milton Bradley Company. The corporate shape shifted. The arrangement underneath did not: Bradley made the things he believed in, and Tapley made sure the lights stayed on.
The catalog that grew out of this period is a document of astonishing range. Bradley's School Supplies and Kindergarten Materials listed 1,250 items: teaching materials, educational toys, chairs, desks, and what the library guide calls "the world's first one-armed paper cutter," which Bradley patented in 1879 as an "improvement in paper-cutting machines." A kindergarten table with folding metal legs followed in 1889. A drawing board. Compasses. A toy spring-gun, patented in 1885, a reminder that the man who wanted to teach children was still also in the toy business, and that boys were still boys.
Among the 1,250 items was the one that best captures Bradley's particular genius and his particular blind spot. In 1877 the company produced Toy Money. The box held cardboard coins printed on both sides, reproducing American currency in exact detail, including the mint year, in denominations of one cent, two cents, five, ten, twenty-five and fifty cents, and one, three, ten and twenty dollars. The paper bills matched real bills in size and design. A note on the box explained the pedagogy in a single breathless sentence:
"This is an exact Fac-simile, on cardboard, of the common current coins in use, making not only an exceedingly amusing but at the same time a very instructive toy, the playing with which must of necessity impress upon the youthful mind the value of the different coins and the art of making change with ease and accuracy, thereby laying the foundation for Elementary Arithmetic, even in the nursery."
Lewis Bradley's apples had become Milton Bradley's coins. The method was the same. Put the abstraction into the child's hands. And the product worked. In 1889 a school superintendent in Hornellsville, New York, named W.R. Prentice cited Bradley's Toy Money in The School Journal as an essential tool for teaching children to count. In 1891 the Journal of Education, warning teachers against educational fads, singled it out for exemption: "Bradley's Toy Money is new and fashionable, but it is not a fad. It should be classed with the classics."
It was also, as it turned out, too good. Around the turn of the century, federal anti-counterfeiting law caught up with the toy. The coins were simply too close to the real thing. The company was ordered to redesign them. The mint dates came off. The coins kept their denominations on one side and gained, on the other, the words "Educational Toy Money / Milton Bradley Co." The bills were enlarged and stamped "Educational." For decades afterward the inside of the box lid carried a long, slightly wounded disclaimer, assuring dealers that the new designs had been "accepted by the proper authority at Washington" and constituted "no moral or actual encroachment upon the most stringent interpretation of the recent laws."
No moral or actual encroachment. Only Milton Bradley would have put the moral encroachment first. And only a lithographer would have made a child's arithmetic aid so exact that the Treasury objected. The same instinct had burned him in 1860. The Lincoln was too faithful to a face that changed. The coins were too faithful to a currency that the law protected. Fidelity was his gift, and twice it had become his liability.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds three copies of Toy Money, from about 1910, 1925, and 1935. By the twentieth century the box had grown a banking game, in which each player started with ten dollars and drew cards instructing deposits for poll tax, income tax, car repairs, interest on a mortgage, and service charges, or withdrawals from bond profits, dividends, a legacy, a trust fund. The first to reach twenty-five dollars won. A kindergarten counting toy, designed by a man who once put Suicide on a game board and refused to use dice, had quietly turned into a lesson in consumer credit.
The Spectrum, Not the Paint Box
Before he could make crayons, Bradley had to decide what red was.
The Froebel gifts were meant to be colored, and Bradley, the color lithographer, refused to treat the question as a matter of taste. By the company's account, he spent months working out the exact shades. He settled on six: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Those six, the company history says, "would remain the standard colors for children's art supplies through the 20th century." If you were an American child at any point in that century, and someone handed you a basic box of crayons or a cheap watercolor tray, you were holding Milton Bradley's answer.
It went far beyond six colors. Bradley built a full system on the spectrum. He worked from the color theory of the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell and the spinning "Maxwell disks" that blended hues optically. Eighteen pure spectrum colors, each with two systematic tints and two shades, would let a color be specified and reproduced accurately anywhere. He patented a color-disk rotating mechanism in 1893 (No. 492,604) and a color-mixing top in 1895 (No. 537,887). The top is a nice echo. The teetotum that replaced dice in 1860 had become, thirty-five years later, an instrument for teaching the spectrum. He built a color wheel; an 1898 example is in the Smithsonian's collection. And he wrote books: Color in the Schoolroom (1890), Color in the Kindergarten (1893), Elementary Color (1895), The Color Primer (1897), and Water Colors in the Schoolroom (1900).
His conviction, as Snyder summarizes it, was that colors should be based on the spectrum and not on artists' pigments, the physicist's colors rather than the painter's. Being a manufacturer, he spent years trying to reconcile the two, because a child paints with pigment, not light. By the 1890s his company had introduced the first standardized watercolor sets in America. It was also the first to package crayons in standardized colors, ahead of the Binney & Smith company that would later make Crayola.
The deepest motive was practical, and it was the lithographer's motive. A standardized color system meant a print shop in one city and a print shop in another could produce the same work in the same colors. It meant the green in a Springfield primer was the green in a San Francisco one. The idea traveled beyond classrooms. The Smithsonian ornithologist Robert Ridgway, who spent his career trying to describe the plumage of birds so that a specimen in one drawer could be matched to a description in another, adopted Bradley's approach in his own work. A bird scientist and a toy maker, both trying to stop color from drifting.
There is something poignant in the arc. A young printer watched his perfect likeness of a candidate become a lie when the candidate changed his face. The old man spent his last productive decades building a system that would make likeness reliable across distance: an orange that meant orange in every schoolroom, a green that would not drift. He could not keep Lincoln from growing a beard. He could, to a remarkable degree, keep a generation of children from disagreeing about violet.
His reach extended into places that complicate any simple celebration. On October 29, 1895, Bradley sent a three-page typed letter to Hugo Münsterberg, the German-born experimental psychologist at Harvard. The Boston Public Library holds it among Münsterberg's correspondence. A board game manufacturer was writing to a laboratory psychologist, which tells you how seriously Bradley took the science of the child's mind. On September 9, 1903, an official of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs signed a letter authorizing the superintendent of the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, an Indian boarding school, to purchase kindergarten supplies from the Milton Bradley Company. The colored papers and wooden gifts that had begun on the floor of a Springfield room with Bradley's own daughters were now government-issue in a school designed to remake Native children. The archive records the transaction without comment. It reads differently now.
By the turn of the century, the money-losing line had stopped losing money. As kindergartens spread and creative play moved from radical theory into ordinary teaching, the teachers needed exactly what Bradley had been making at a loss for thirty years. Educational supplies became a large share of the company's income: toy money, multiplication sticks, movable clock dials, paints, papers. The company opened a New York office in 1892 and by 1903 had offices in Kansas, Atlanta, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. The prominent educator William Mowry called Bradley "the pioneer and chief promoter of kindergarten work in America." Bradley joined the National Education Association in 1892, a game maker among schoolmasters.
He retired from the company in 1907. Later, looking back on the kindergarten work, he wrote the passage that comes closest to a self-portrait. He did not, he said, wish to confine "success" to "that cheap interpretation which sees only the glitter of gold or the glamour of illusive fame."
— Milton Bradley, reflecting on the kindergarten movement after his retirementIn my case, I cannot overestimate the feeling of satisfaction which has been with me all these years at the thought that I have been identified with the movement and have done something, if only something ordinary in character, to place the kindergarten on its present solid foundation.
If only something ordinary in character. It is the humility of the patent agent, the man whose career began by making other people's inventions legible. It is also a quiet rebuke to the hundred-point rule of his own first game.
The family summered at a house in Maine they called Shore Acres. The guest book, now fragile and missing its binding in the Springfield Museums, records visits from 1896 into the early 1900s. Nellie is there, and the daughters, and a son-in-law named Robert Ingersoll, and visitors from Springfield, most prominently the Van Norman family. George Tapley is there too. The boy from Vienna had come back to Maine, at least for the summers.
Milton Bradley died in Springfield on May 30, 1911, at seventy-four. He was buried in Springfield Cemetery in a family plot beside his father, Lewis (1810–1890), his mother, Fanny (1813–1872), and his first wife, Vilona. Nellie joined them in 1918. The potato-starch man and the game maker share a stone. The family that had moved five times stopped moving in the end.
The Second Fire
The company passed from hand to hand like a teetotum running down. Robert Ellis took it first, then Bradley's son-in-law Robert Ingersoll, then William Tapley, George's son. In 1920 the Milton Bradley Company bought the game production of McLoughlin Brothers, the New York firm whose games had been the high-water mark of nineteenth-century American game artistry and which had gone under after John McLoughlin's death. For a while Bradley reissued McLoughlin games under its own label. Sometimes only the box cover changed; sometimes even the cover was identical. The upstart lithographer's company had swallowed the old aristocrat of the trade and was reprinting its boards.
Then came the decline of the 1920s and the collapse of the 1930s. Fewer people spent money on board games. Whitehill notes that cheap games, like movies, were among the few amusements Depression families could still afford, and the company survived by selling inexpensive ones. But it kept losing money. By 1940 the banks were calling their loans.
The board, desperate to avoid bankruptcy, persuaded a Springfield businessman named James J. Shea to take the presidency. Shea's compressed biography rhymes eerily with his predecessor's. He was a local man of practical, mechanical turn, and as war approached he would invent a universal joint used on the landing gear of fighter planes, which the toy factory would build. The armory town's game company would make airplane parts, just as its founder, eighty years earlier, had tried and failed to design weapons.
Shea's first act, though, is the one that matters most to this story. He renovated the plant by burning old inventory that had been piling up since the turn of the century.
Here was the second fire. Eighty years after Bradley fed his beardless Lincolns to the flames, his company's new president burned decades of unsold stock. Games nobody wanted, puzzles of a world that had moved on, the residue of the founder's restless production. The lesson Bradley had learned at twenty-three, that inventory loyal to a vanished moment is worth nothing and should be destroyed, had to be learned again by the institution he left behind. Companies forget what their founders knew. Then a stranger comes in and strikes the match.
The war that followed played out like an echo of the first. The company cut its line from 410 titles to 150. It built Shea's universal joint. And it revived the oldest idea in its catalog, game kits for soldiers, revised for a new generation of bored young men in camps. The kits earned the company $2 million. Bradley's Civil War insight, a dollar a box for the hours between drills, saved his company in the next great war.
New games kept coming even in wartime: the patriotic Game of the States, Chutes & Ladders in 1943, and in 1949 Candy Land, designed by Eleanor Abbott. Chutes & Ladders is an Americanized version of the ancient Indian game of snakes and ladders, a moral game in which virtues lift you and vices drop you. In other words, it is The Checkered Game of Life stripped down for children too young to read the word "Intemperance." And Candy Land has no reading, no counting beyond colors, and no decision at all, a pure exercise in following. Somewhere Froebel was nodding.
Television should have killed the board game. Shea made it a distribution channel. In 1950 the company produced what Whitehill calls probably the first television-based game, Hopalong Cassidy. In 1959 came Concentration, built on the NBC game show, which proved so durable that new editions came out every year until 1982, nine years after the show itself was cancelled. The cardboard copy outlived the broadcast original. Somewhere a lithographer would have appreciated that.
Who Can Make the Most Money
In 1960 the Milton Bradley Company turned one hundred. To celebrate, it brought back the founder's first game.
The designer Reuben Klamer reworked it so thoroughly that it barely resembled the original. The name was shortened to The Game of Life. The board became a winding three-dimensional road through college and career and marriage and a car full of pegs for children. The squares marked Suicide and Ruin and Intemperance were gone. So was Happy Old Age as a destination. The new object of the game was to become a millionaire.
To understand what had happened, you have to bring in George Parker. Parker was a fellow Massachusetts game maker, a generation younger than Bradley, and he grew up on morality games like The Checkered Game of Life and hated them. He wanted to play a game, Donovan says, without it being "a Sunday sermon every time." His first game, Banking, was about piling up money through speculation. The goal was to be the richest. Parker Brothers would go on to publish Monopoly, the most successful money game ever made. And somewhere along the way, in one of those corporate ironies that only a long enough timeline produces, Parker Brothers also came to publish The Mansion of Happiness, the 1843 Puritan sermon that Bradley's game had displaced.
So in 1960 Milton Bradley's own company rebuilt his game in George Parker's image. The modernized Life, in Donovan's words, was "more in line with the Parker approach of who can make the most money and have a successful career." The gentle hypocrisy of the 1860 rulebook, which named Happy Old Age the destination and handed victory to the first player with a hundred points, had resolved in favor of the points. The century had made its choice.
Yet the 1960 game kept one thing. As the philosopher John K. Roth recalled in the Los Angeles Times in 1990, losing at the new Game of Life meant retiring to the country to "become a philosopher." The consolation prize for failing to become a millionaire was a life of reflection. Bradley would have been puzzled by the framing. He might have been quietly pleased with the outcome.
The rest of the 1960s belonged to the company's appetite for the new. In 1966 came Twister, which became a phenomenon after Johnny Carson made suggestive remarks while Eva Gabor played it on The Tonight Show. A game whose pieces were human bodies tangled on a mat, made by the company of a man who disapproved of dancing. James Shea Jr. succeeded his father as president in 1967, became chief executive in 1968, and bought Playskool and the E.S. Lowe Company, makers of Yahtzee, a dice game sold under the name of the man who had refused to use dice. In 1962 ground was broken in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, for a plant that would grow to some 1.1 million square feet across twenty acres, employing about 1,800 people at 443 Shaker Road.
Then the company chased the electronic age, late and fast. Simon arrived in 1978, late to the handheld wave, and by 1980 it was the company's best-selling item. It sold so fast that, according to one chronicler, the company shipped units it knew did not work, at full price, so parents would have something to put under the tree, with a promise to make it right afterward. Bradley had once stamped "educational" on his coins rather than let them pass for real; now his company was knowingly selling broken goods to beat the holiday deadline. In 1979 came the Microvision, the first handheld console with interchangeable cartridges, designed by Jay Smith. Revenue peaked at $420.7 million in 1980. By 1982 it had fallen to $360.2 million, with profits of $19.2 million.
The company placed its bet. In early 1983 it bought General Consumer Electronics, which held the rights to Smith's Vectrex, a home console that drew its graphics as crisp vector lines instead of pixels. The machine was elegant. The timing was catastrophic. The home video game market was about to collapse, and the bet arrived precisely as the floor gave way.
There was also a lawsuit. Two independent inventors, Roger Burten and Allen Coleman, doing business as Rainy Day Games & Toys, had twice submitted an electronic board game called Triumph to the company, signing its standard "Disclosure Record" each time. Twice it was rejected. About a year later the company released Dark Tower, an electronic board game the inventors believed borrowed their structure and design. A jury in Rhode Island agreed and awarded substantial damages. Judge Bruce Selya, writing in 1984, opened his opinion with a sentence that sums up a century of empire in a single clause.
— Judge Bruce M. Selya, Burten v. Milton Bradley Co., 592 F. Supp. 1021 (D.R.I. 1984)The defendant, Milton Bradley Company (MB), is a colossus which has stood astride the toy and game industry for many a moon.
Selya then overturned the verdict. The disclosure form, he ruled, controlled. The inventors appealed to the First Circuit, which affirmed. The appellate decision is dated May 30, 1985, seventy-four years to the day after Milton Bradley died. The patent agent who had spent his youth drawing other men's inventions so precisely that the government could not misread them had become, in death, the name on a company winning a case about whether it had taken another man's invention.
By then the company was no longer independent. On May 4, 1984, the Milton Bradley Company agreed to sell itself to its rival Hasbro, of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, for about $350 million. The deal closed that September, and it took Playskool with it. In 1989 a Milton Bradley line under Hasbro published Trump: The Game, whose rulebook stated that "the object of the game is to make the most money," and whose box carried the slogan "It's not whether you win or lose, but whether you win!" The road from Happy Old Age had arrived somewhere specific.
The rest is corporate housekeeping. Hasbro bought Tonka, and with it Parker Brothers, in 1991. In 1998 Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers, the moralist and the speculator, merged to form Hasbro Games. The two names survived as brands until 2009, when Hasbro retired both in favor of its own. The Milton Bradley name had been in use for 149 years. Like a likeness that no longer matched the face, it was quietly withdrawn from circulation.
Most Americans now meet the man himself, if they meet him at all, in children's books: Kirsten Anderson's Who Was Milton Bradley?, in the Who Was? series, or Raymond H. Miller's slim Milton Bradley from KidHaven Press, both written at a reading level he would have approved of. This seems right. He spent the best part of his life making things for children to hold in their hands.
The factory in East Longmeadow still makes The Game of Life. The suicides are long gone, the millionaires arrived in 1960, and the board has been redesigned again and again since. The moral vocabulary is entirely absent. And yet one thing survives every revision. There are still no dice. In the middle of the board sits a plastic spinner, a legacy, Donovan says, not of religion anymore but of habit. A child flicks it with one finger. It whirs, slows, and clicks to a stop on a number, the way a teetotum dropped onto a checkered board in a parlor in Springfield once did, the winter a young man burned his Lincolns and decided that chance, if it had to exist, should at least not look like sin.
Part IIThe Playbook
Milton Bradley's career is usually filed under "pivot," and the Lincoln fire is cited as a parable of resilience. That reading is too shallow. What follows are twelve principles drawn from the record: the patents, the catalogs, the investor fights, the redesigned coins, and the institutional echoes that outlived him. Some apply to founders. Some apply to the companies founders leave behind. Several concern a hazard specific to people who are very good at something: the way an exceptional skill, pushed far enough, becomes a vulnerability.
The principles
- 1.Burn the dead stock.
- 2.Find a second use for the idle press.
- 3.Design around the scruple, not against it.
- 4.Carry the first run yourself.
- 5.Build for the hour of boredom.
- 6.Write the rulebook and own the category.
- 7.Let the market fund the mission until the mission becomes a market.
- 8.When investors force a choice, know which business is yours.
- 9.Standardize what others treat as taste.
- 10.Beware the perfect facsimile.
- 11.Keep one friend with capital and patience.
- 12.Expect your heirs to change the object of the game.
M
The Bradley Timeline
Fifty-one years from founding to death, decided by a handful of moments.
1847
Lewis Bradley's potato-starch business fails after the blight; the family moves to Lowell.
1856
Bradley joins Wason Car Manufacturing in Springfield as a draftsman.
1859
Travels to Providence to learn lithography.
1860
Opens his lithography shop; the beardless Lincoln fails; The Checkered Game of Life launches.
1861
More than 45,000 copies sold; soldier game kits follow at $1 apiece.
1864
Incorporates with partners as Milton Bradley & Company.
1866
Patent No. 53,561 issued; publishes croquet rules as "Prof. A. Rover."
1869
Marries Nellie Thayer; hears Elizabeth Peabody; publishes Paradise of Childhood.
1874
Investors demand the kindergarten work end; Bradley refuses; George Tapley buys them out.
1877
Toy Money introduced; later redesigned under anti-counterfeiting law.
1890
Publishes Color in the Schoolroom, the first of his color books.
1907
Retires from the company.
1911
Dies in Springfield on May 30, aged 74.
Principle 1
Burn the dead stock
The easiest thing to romanticize in Bradley's story is the fire. The harder thing to see is what it cost. A young printer with one unreliable machine and a payroll of temperamental pressmen did not destroy his Lincoln lithographs on a whim. He destroyed them because he understood that inventory loyal to a vanished moment does not get less worthless if you store it. Keeping it has its own costs: space, attention, and the temptation to keep trying to sell what the market has already refused.
The proof that the lesson matters is that his company forgot it. By 1940 the Milton Bradley plant was choked with stock accumulated since the turn of the century, and it took an outsider, James J. Shea, to burn it as his first act as president. In the same year he renovated the plant, and within a few years the company had cut its catalog from 410 titles to 150. Founders often have the stomach for this kind of destruction. Institutions rarely do. They mistake old stock for history.
The discipline is not pessimism. It is the recognition that the market's verdict on a specific product is usually final, and that the energy spent contesting it is energy not spent on the next thing. Bradley did not spend 1861 trying to sell beardless Lincolns. He spent it selling forty-five thousand copies of a game.
Tactic: Once a quarter, list every product, feature, or initiative you are keeping alive mainly out of sunk-cost loyalty, and kill at least one.
Principle 2
Find a second use for the idle press
Bradley did not set out to invent the American board game industry. He set out to keep his lithograph machine busy. The company history describes him searching "for new applications for his lithograph machine," and the game came out of that search. The insight was not "make games." It was "I own the most expensive input of a product nobody in Springfield is making yet."
Color printing was the hard part of a nineteenth-century game, the boards, the boxes, the illustrated sheets pasted onto cardboard. Most game makers of the era were book publishers who bought printing. Bradley owned it, and had improved it. The Civil War kits, the zoetrope strips, the Myriopticon panoramas, the jigsaw puzzles from 1880, the colored kindergarten papers were all, in one sense, the same move repeated: what else can this press make?
Founders tend to define their companies by their first product. Bradley's career suggests defining them by their underused capability instead. The question is not "what do we sell?" but "what do we own that is sitting idle, and who would pay for its output in another form?"
Tactic: Inventory the capabilities your company has that are running below capacity (a production process, a data asset, a distribution relationship) and brainstorm three products each could make for a different customer.
Principle 3
Design around the scruple, not against it
In 1860 many respectable American households considered games sinful, and Bradley himself was devout enough to worry about how his friends would react. A less imaginative founder would have treated this as a market obstacle to overcome, by arguing, persuading, or waiting for attitudes to change. Bradley turned it into product design. The game would teach morality. The squares would carry virtues and vices. And the dice, the symbol of the gambling den, would be replaced by a teetotum.
The teetotum did nothing a die could not do. It produced random numbers. What it changed was association, and association was what the market cared about. The result was a product that could be sold "as a lesson in morals as well as an entertaining pastime," which is precisely why New York dealers took Bradley's entire first run in two days. The scruple that blocked other games became Bradley's distribution advantage.
The longevity of this decision is remarkable. The 1960 Game of Life dropped every moral square but kept the spinner, now as habit rather than theology. Design choices made to satisfy a cultural objection can become a permanent part of a product's identity long after the objection is gone.
L
The Object of the Game, 1843–1989
How the stated goal of American board games migrated from virtue to wealth.
| Game | Randomizer | Stated object | Moral frame |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Mansion of Happiness (Ives, 1843) | Teetotum | Reach the heavenly mansion | Virtue as end |
| The Checkered Game of Life (Bradley, 1860) | Teetotum | First to 100 points; Happy Old Age the ideal | Virtue as means |
| Banking (Parker, Gilded Age) | Cards | Be the richest through speculation | Wealth as end |
| The Game of Life (Milton Bradley Co., 1960) | Spinner | Become a millionaire | Wealth as end |
| Trump: The Game (Milton Bradley Co., 1989) | Dice | "Make the most money" | Winning as end |
Tactic: Identify the strongest cultural objection to your category, and ask how the product could be redesigned so that satisfying that objection becomes the reason people buy.
Principle 4
Carry the first run yourself
Bradley spent weeks producing several hundred copies of his game on his own press, then personally took them to New York and sold them to stationers, newsstands, and department stores. He did not hire a distributor. He did not run a test. He was the test. And he came back empty-handed in the best possible sense.
This mattered for reasons beyond the revenue. Sitting across from buyers in Manhattan, Bradley heard firsthand why his product sold. It was a morals lesson parents could buy without guilt, a game that was permissible. That knowledge is hard to get secondhand. The pitch that worked in a New York stationery shop in 1860 became the positioning of the whole company: games that were good for you.
The pattern held. Bradley noticed bored soldiers in Springfield with his own eyes. He met kindergarten teachers as a fellow teacher, in a classroom where he taught his own daughters. His product decisions came from direct observation of real customers, not from reports about them.
Tactic: Before scaling any new product, personally sell the first batch to real buyers, face to face, and write down the exact words they use to justify the purchase.
Principle 5
Build for the hour of boredom
When the Civil War began, Bradley's first instinct was to follow the money into weaponry. It went nowhere. His second instinct was better. He looked at the soldiers idling in Springfield's camps and saw a market that had not existed months earlier: young men with long stretches of empty time, a little pay, and no room in their knapsacks. He made a compact box of games and sold it for a dollar. Charities bought kits in bulk to send to the front.
The insight was not about games. It was about the gaps in people's days. Wars, like most large undertakings, consist mostly of waiting, and whoever serves the waiting has a customer base that the headline activity ignores. The proof came eighty years later. In World War II the same company, nearly bankrupt in 1940, revived revised soldier game kits and earned $2 million from them, a material part of its rescue.
The broader principle applies anywhere attention is captive and underserved: commutes, waiting rooms, layovers, recovery wards. The most durable products often live not in the main event but in the dead time around it.
Tactic: Map the idle intervals in your customer's day or workflow, and design one product or feature specifically for the time they are waiting rather than working.
Principle 6
Write the rulebook and own the category
When croquet spread across American lawns in the 1860s, everyone played it a little differently. Bradley became the first American manufacturer of croquet sets, and he shipped each with an authoritative set of rules he had assembled from oral tradition and his own sense of fair play, published under the joking pseudonym "Prof. A. Rover." Anyone could carve a mallet. Bradley put the referee in the box.
He applied the same instinct to physical standards. By 1876 his company was producing folding game boards at 18½ inches square, the dimension Whitehill notes is still standard. Later he set the six colors of children's art supplies for a century. Each case was a draftsman's move: take something that existed loosely and in many versions, fix it precisely, and make your version the reference point everyone else has to match.
The commercial advantage is quiet and compounding. Once your rules or dimensions become the norm, competitors are working inside a frame you drew. The rulebook is the cheapest moat there is.
Tactic: Find the most argued-over or inconsistent practice in your category and publish the clearest, most authoritative standard for it under your name.
Principle 7
Let the market fund the mission until the mission becomes a market
From roughly 1869 onward, Bradley ran two businesses under one roof. Games made money. Kindergarten materials, magazines, and school supplies lost it, sometimes because he gave them away. The Engines of Our Ingenuity summary is blunt: the educational line lost money "for decades."
Then the world moved toward him. As kindergartens multiplied and creative play entered mainstream teaching, the materials he had been making at a loss for thirty years became what teachers needed. By the turn of the century, educational supplies were a large share of the company's income, sold through a 1,250-item catalog and regional offices from Atlanta to San Francisco. The Journal of Education was calling his toy money a classic. William Mowry called him "the pioneer and chief promoter of kindergarten work in America."
The structure is worth naming. A commercial product with clear demand financed a long-horizon bet on a social change the founder believed was coming. The bet was not a hobby. It was early. The risk, of course, is that "early" and "wrong" look identical for a long time, which is why the next principle matters.
Tactic: If you are funding a long-horizon bet out of current profits, define in writing the external signal (adoption, regulation, demographic shift) that would tell you the world is moving toward it, and track that signal annually.
Principle 8
When investors force a choice, know which business is yours
In the mid-1870s, during the Long Depression, Bradley's investors gave him a clean ultimatum: the kindergarten work goes, or they go. On any conventional analysis the kindergarten work should have gone. It was unprofitable, the economy was terrible, and the games were paying the bills.
Bradley kept the kindergarten work and let the investors leave. The decision only makes sense if you accept his own framing, which was that the educational line was the real business and the games were its financing. He did not experience the choice as sacrificing profit for charity. He experienced it as declining to sell his company's purpose to people who did not share it.
It is worth being honest that this decision only worked because someone, George Tapley, stepped in with capital. But the principle stands apart from the rescue. Investor pressure clarifies what a founder actually believes the company is for. Bradley's answer, under maximum pressure, was unambiguous, and his late-life writing about "success" shows he never regretted it.
B
The Bradley Bets
Major product decisions and how each resolved.
| Bet | Year | What happened | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beardless Lincoln lithograph | 1860 | Subject changed his face; refunds demanded | Burned |
| The Checkered Game of Life | 1860 | 45,000+ sold by spring 1861 | Scaled |
| Soldier game kits | 1861 | $1 kits bought by troops and charities | Scaled |
| Kindergarten materials | 1869 | Lost money for decades, then became core income | Patient |
| Toy Money | 1877 | Too exact; redesigned under counterfeit law | Redesigned |
| Vectrex / GCE acquisition | 1983 | Bought into a collapsing market; company sold in 1984 | Fatal |
Tactic: Write down, before any crisis arrives, which part of your company you would keep if forced to choose only one, and revisit that answer whenever investor terms change.
Principle 9
Standardize what others treat as taste
Color, in the nineteenth century, was a matter of opinion. One printer's red was another's crimson. Bradley, the lithographer, refused to accept that. He spent months choosing six pigments, built a full spectrum system of eighteen pure colors with systematic tints and shades, patented the disks and tops to demonstrate it, wrote five books about it, and introduced the first standardized watercolor sets and crayon packages in America.
The payoff was larger than a product line. Standardization let print shops in different cities produce the same colors, let teachers across the country teach the same lessons, and attracted adoption from far outside his industry. The Smithsonian ornithologist Robert Ridgway took up Bradley's approach in classifying bird plumage. When you standardize something everyone else treats as subjective, you become infrastructure.
The general lesson is that the most durable advantages often hide in vocabulary. Whoever defines the terms (the colors, the sizes, the categories) shapes every conversation that follows.
Tactic: Find a dimension of your market that customers currently describe inconsistently, and build the reference system that lets them describe it the same way.
Principle 10
Beware the perfect facsimile
Twice in his life, Bradley's greatest skill hurt him. The Lincoln lithograph was a faithful likeness of a face that changed. Toy Money reproduced American coins, mint dates included, so exactly that federal anti-counterfeiting law forced a redesign, complete with the word "educational" stamped across each piece and a long, faintly injured disclaimer inside the box lid.
The underlying pattern is that fidelity to an original ties your product's value to that original's stability and legal status. When the original moves (a candidate grows a beard) or is protected (the Treasury guards its currency), the copy's very accuracy becomes the problem. The more perfectly you mirror something you do not control, the more exposed you are to it.
The Game of Life is the counterexample. It was an abstraction, a diagram of life rather than a picture of any particular one, and abstractions age far more slowly than likenesses. The beardless Lincoln lasted months. The checkered board, redesigned but recognizable, has lasted more than 160 years.
Tactic: For any product that closely mirrors an external platform, standard, or person you do not control, identify exactly what would happen if that original changed tomorrow, and design an abstraction layer that survives it.
Principle 11
Keep one friend with capital and patience
George Tapley shows up at every turning point in the Bradley story and almost nowhere in its retellings. He was a schoolmate from Lowell. His parlor game started the company. His money bought out the dissenting investors in 1874, and he donated four of his own buildings and took the presidency. His son William would eventually run the firm. He is in the guest book at Shore Acres decades later.
Founder mythology tends to erase people like Tapley, because a story about one man's vision is cleaner than a story about two friends. But Bradley's most important decision, keeping the kindergarten work against his investors' wishes, was only survivable because a friend with capital trusted him more than the spreadsheet did. Mission-driven founders need a backer whose patience matches the time horizon of the mission.
This kind of capital cannot be raised on demand. It is accumulated over years of friendship and trust, long before it is needed. Tapley's money was the product of a relationship that began in high school.
Tactic: Identify the one or two people in your life whose trust in you would survive a bad quarter, and invest in those relationships long before you need to ask anything of them.
Principle 12
Expect your heirs to change the object of the game
Bradley's first game named Happy Old Age as the ideal and made virtue the path to it. In 1960 his own company rebuilt the game so that the object was to become a millionaire, the approach of his younger rival George Parker. In 1989 the company's catalog carried a game whose rulebook stated that the object was "to make the most money." In 1998 his company merged with Parker's. In 2009 his name came off the box altogether.
None of this was betrayal in any simple sense. The institution did what institutions do: it adapted to a culture that had, over a century, moved its definition of success from virtue to wealth. Some of the adaptations were brilliant, such as television tie-ins and the revived soldier kits. Some were fatal, like the Vectrex bet. What survived, interestingly, were the founder's design habits rather than his values: the spinner instead of dice, the moral board structure under Chutes & Ladders, the six colors in the crayon box.
The lesson for founders is uncomfortable. You can choose what you build. You cannot choose what it becomes. The most durable parts of your legacy may be your methods, not your messages.
Tactic: Separate what you want your company to believe from how you want it to work, and spend at least as much effort embedding the methods in your systems as you do preaching the beliefs.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Milton Bradley, on the kindergarten movement, after his retirementIn using the word success, I do not wish to confine its meaning to that cheap interpretation which sees only the glitter of gold or the glamour of illusive fame.
— Milton Bradley, to his father, after hearing Elizabeth Peabody lecture on the kindergartenPapa! That's just how you taught me!
— Instructions for The Checkered Game of Life (1860)To gain on his journey that which shall make him the most prosperous, and to shun that which will retard him in his progress.
— Milton Bradley Company, box text for Toy Money (1877)This is an exact Fac-simile, on cardboard, of the common current coins in use, making not only an exceedingly amusing but at the same time a very instructive toy.
— William Mowry, educatorThe pioneer and chief promoter of kindergarten work in America.
Maxims
- Burn what the market has refused. Inventory loyal to a vanished moment only gets more expensive to keep.
- Your idle machine is a business plan. The best next product often uses the capability you already own and underuse.
- Turn the objection into the feature. Bradley replaced dice with a teetotum and sold a game to families who distrusted games.
- Sell the first run with your own hands. The buyer's exact words are the positioning you could never have invented.
- Serve the waiting. Wars, like workdays, are mostly dead time, and the dead time has customers.
- Ship the referee in the box. Whoever writes the rules owns the category.
- Make taste into a standard. Six colors, fixed precisely, outlasted every game Bradley ever designed.
- Fidelity is a liability when the original moves. Abstractions age slowly; likenesses go stale in months.
- Know which business is yours before someone forces you to choose. Bradley kept the money-losing kindergarten line and let the investors leave.
- Your methods will outlive your messages. The moral squares disappeared in 1960; the spinner is still there.
