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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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. 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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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.