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pursued lithography and in 1860, he set up the first color lithography shop in Springfield, Massachusetts

moved forward with an idea he had for a board game which he called The Checkered Game of Life, an early version of what later became The Game of Life.

2004, he was posthumously inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame along with George Ditomassi of Milton Bradley Company. Through the 20th century the company he founded in 1860, Milton Bradley Company dominated the production of American games, with titles like Candyland, Operation, and Battleship. The company is now a subsidiary of Pawtucket, Rhode Island-based Hasbro.

In search of a lucrative alternative project in which to employ his drafting skills, Bradley found inspiration from an imported board game given to him by a friend. Concluding that he could produce and market a similar game to American consumers, Milton Bradley released The Checkered Game of Life in the winter of 1860.

Bradley personally sold his first run of several hundred copies in one two-day period in New York; by 1861, consumers had bought over 45,000 copies.

While the structure of play used in The Checkered Game of Life differed little from previous board games, Bradley's game embraced a radically different concept of success. Earlier children's games, such as the popular Mansion of Happiness developed in Puritan Massachusetts, were concerned entirely with providing an attractive venue from which to promote moral virtue. But Bradley preferred to define success in secular business terms consistent with America's emerging focus on "the causal relationship between character and wealth." This approach, which depicted life as a quest for accomplishment in which personal virtues provided a means to an end, rather than a point of focus, complemented America's burgeoning fascination with obtaining wealth in the years following the Civil War.

Bradley established a set of rules to play croquet in 1866. Bradley was one of the marketers of the zoetrope, a spinning slotted drum with pre-printed images to create the illusion of motion pictures. Though this was not definitely known as of November 2010, Bradley might have been awarded the patent for the one-arm paper cutter.