A recession in 1857 forced the company to shut its doors a year later, and in 1858, Milton Bradley decided that he would go into business for himself. He got the job, at seven-and-a-half dollars a week. According to Bradley’s diary, when the company superintendent replied that they didn’t, Bradley asked if they needed one and announced that he was the man for the position. The day he arrived, he walked into the well-known maker of rail cars, Wason Car-Manufacturing Company, and asked if they had a draftsman. That same year, he decided to leave home and he moved to the “big” city, Springfield, Massachusetts, population just over 14,000. He moved with his family to Lowell, Massachusetts, when he was 11, and then to Hartford, Connecticut, when he was 19. Milton Bradley, a name firmly associated now with Springfield, Massachusetts, actually was born in Maine, in 1836. Just a few years later, in 1860, a young Milton Bradley decided to turn his lithography company into a game company. The Amusing Game of Conundrums, 1853, by John McLoughlin,įather of John and Edmond, the “McLoughlin Brothers” They were prolific, and their games were of high artistic quality. Then in the 1850s, John McLoughlin added a few games to his publishing business (most games at that time were produced by book publishers) and soon his two sons joined together to form a company, McLoughlin Bros., which was to become the premiere games company of the 19 th century. before then, but very few meanwhile, Ives began producing many other games, predominantly card games, in the 1840s and early ‘50s. There had been games invented and manufactured in the U.S. Following the style of the Game of Goose, invented in the 1500s in Italy, and keeping with the morality of the time, the two men created a simple path game, The Mansion of Happiness, similar to its English counterpart, in which virtue was rewarded and vice punished. The American games industry began as an industry in 1843 with the games of two brothers, William and Stephen B. In the heart of this area, Springfield, Massachusetts, one man, Milton Bradley, a draughtsman in his early 20s, decided to embark on a business that would not only alter his life, but change the impact that games had on society for educational and recreational activities in the United States and Europe. The Northeast-or, more exactly, New York, Pennsylvania and New England-was the industrial center of the country. Increased industrialization led to more leisure time and to improvements in the welfare of children children were allowed more time for play, once the schooling and the chores were done. The elevator and the burglar alarm had just been invented and the new Western Union was exploiting a recent invention, the telegraph.

The move from farmland to cities continued, as did the westward migration, even though the Gold Rush in California had ended in 1855.

The country was divided between the slave owners in the Confederate states of the South and the abolitionists-those against slavery-in the Union states of the North. The population was over 31 million, 4 million of whom were slaves.

was less than 44 years, though a man in his 20s could be expected to live, on average, to 60. Immigration from Europe continued, following the emigration of more than 1.3 million people from England and, especially, Ireland over the previous decade. The Checkered Game of Life Milton Bradley’s First Game, 1860īased on a talk given by the author at the 2010 Board Game Studies Colloquium in Paris.

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