When Games Got Patented: Montague Redgrave's 1871 Bagatelle Blueprint

In 1871, the year the great Chicago fire reshaped American enterprise and the railroad connected coasts, a New York inventor named Montague Redgrave walked into the U.S. Patent Office with drawings for a game. Not a children's toy, but a mechanical bagatelle table, a contraption of balls, pins, and cunning angles designed to test skill and chance in equal measure.

Bagatelle had arrived in America from England and France decades earlier, riding the wave of parlor games that captivated the emerging middle class. But Redgrave's invention wasn't mere recreation. It was engineering. His patent drawings, approved as No. 115,357, show the measured precision of a man who understood that play, like any other enterprise in the Gilded Age, could be systematized, manufactured, and patented.

What strikes you about looking at this document now is how deliberately it was composed. The Patent Office sheet preserves every signature, every technical figure, every label exactly as the examiner approved it. No embellishment. No waste. The border, the spacing, the placement of Redgrave's name alongside the date and patent number, all of it speaks to an era when the machinery of innovation was itself a form of art.

The bagatelle table itself is long forgotten, likely lost to attics or landfills more than a century ago. But this patent endures, a paper record of ambition and ingenuity frozen in the moment of official recognition. It's why we preserve it on archival ground, unaltered and unfussy, the way it was drawn.

Paper and Craft

This print is rendered on 325gsm museum-grade archival matte paper using fade-resistant giclée pigment inks. The weight and surface absorb color with remarkable depth while the archival composition ensures your 1871 blueprint stays vivid for generations, whether framed in Slimwood Silver, Gold, or Satin Black, or displayed unframed.