Lithography in the 19th century consisted of drawing an image onto a stone surface and then using ink and chemicals to make copies of the image. A printer could mass produce beautiful and detailed color pictures.
Milton bought a printing press in Providence, Rhode Island. He opened his own printing shop with two business partners, J.F. Tapley and Clark Bryan. The press could only do two hundred sheets per hour, which was a low output at the time. Nevertheless, the shop was successful in printing catalogs for area business, as well as business cards.
Milton Bradley was active in local politics and was a strong supporter of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 Presidential election. With the support of the local Republican Party, he printed up pictures of Abraham Lincoln to sell. Massachusetts was overwhelmingly pro-Lincoln, and the pictures sold very well.
However, the lithograph presented Lincoln clean shaven. When Lincoln grew a beard, people stopped buy the lithographs because they didn’t look like Lincoln anymore. For some reason, Milton offered refunds if people returned the pictures! This resulted in a great financial loss for his business. Milton Bradley had to think of new ways to make money.
Milton Bradley liked playing board games with his friends. Most popular games, however, were imports and he didn’t like most of them because they were based entirely on chance, and weren’t educational.
He saw the potential in inventing a simple, fun and educational board game. He invented, and patented, a game called “The Checkered Game of Life”. It wasn’t the first board game in history to simulate a person’s journey through life. But previous games were built around chance. Milton’s innovation was to put in elements of choice and strategy. The use of dice was stigmatized because of their association with gambling. Instead, the game included a “teetotum”, a spinning top with numbers on the sides, similar to a dreidl.
He personally took the game to toy stores in several metropolitan areas including New York City. He proved to be a talented salesman, and “The Checkered Game of Life” became very popular. Over 45,000 copies of the game were sold in the first year. He later patented the game design: US Patent #53,561 “Game Board”.
