October 25 - William Higinbotham

Image courtesy cbc.ca

On this day, in 1910, William Higinbotham, contributing inventor of the atomic bomb and early video game designer, was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. William did most of his growing up in Caledonia, New York before moving to Massachusetts to attend Williams College. After earning his undergraduate degree in 1932, he really stepped out of his comfort zone, hiking all the way to New York City to continue his studies at Cornell University. His area of expertise was the burgeoning field of electronics. When World War II started with a bang, William began working for the federal government at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helping to develop a radar system for the military, including the display found in B-28 bombers. After two years on that project, he was moved out to New Mexico in 1943 to become part of the top secret group creating the nuclear bomb. As head of the electronics team for the Manhattan Project, William was responsible for the bomb’s ignition system. He was present at the Trinity Test, the first detonation of a nuclear bomb, and it profoundly affected his worldview.

Image courtesy atomicheritage.org

William immediately realized the implications of the Bomb and knew, now that the genie was out of the bottle, that everything must be done to contain him as much as possible. In February 1946, just months after the weapon he helped create ended World War II, he co-founded the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit group dedicated to the non-proliferation of nuclear devices. William served as the first Chairman of the FAS and over the next four decades would hold various positions including Executive Secretary, Council member and even Chairman again. The FAS counted among its major political victories the defeat of a bill that would have put nuclear research under the control of the military and the creation of the US Atomic Energy Commission.

Image courtesy nist.gov

In 1947, William began working at Brookhaven National Laboratory for the AEC in the job he would hold for the rest of his career. Eleven years into his tenure, he was in charge of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven and created something that was years ahead of its time. The laboratory held an annual exhibition it called Visitor Days. William noticed that most of the displays were fairly static and dry (a nice way to say boring). He thought it might liven things up a bit if there was a game people could play that would showcase some of the work being done at Brookhaven and be entertaining at the same time. Enlisting the help of two colleagues, David Potter and Robert Dvorak Sr, he created a tennis simulation that involved separate controllers for each player and displayed the ball bouncing over a net on an oscilloscope screen (the round screen that you always see radar on in the movies). He says it took about two hours for him to make a rough design of the system and Potter and Dvorak about two weeks to build and debug it.

Image courtesy imdb.com

Tennis for Two, considered by many to be the world’s first video game (it preceded Pong, the first video game anyone remembers, by fourteen years), debuted at the 1958 Visitor Days and was an instant hit. Hundreds of visitors lined up to play the game throughout the entire event. One of the interesting aspects of Tennis, at least from a post-Pong perspective, is that the action was viewed from the side rather than from above. That means that players watched the ball arc up and over a stationary net rather than seeing the ball simply move from one side of the screen to the other and back. When the exhibition rolled around the following year, a second version of Tennis for Two was created which incorporated a bigger screen and options to do things like increase or decrease the effect of gravity on the ball to simulate playing on other planets. And then the game quietly disappeared. Since William amassed more than 20 patents during his lifetime for various ideas relating to electronics, he was asked near the end of his life why no one ever patented Tennis. He said he had no personal reason to as the patent would have belonged to the government, not him and the government thought the whole idea was a lot of silliness with no practical value (never mind the fact that the video game industry had sales of more than $43 Billion just in the US in 2018).

In 1974, William began acting as technical director on the Journal of Nuclear Materials Management, a quarterly publication of Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (Brookhaven is one of the sustaining members of the INMM). While he retired from the Lab in 1984, he would continue to assist with the Journal for the rest of his life. He passed away on November 10, 1994 in Gainsville, Georgia, hoping that he would be remembered more for his work on nuclear nonproliferation than for his work in creating video games, but we don’t always get what we want. Not that his son didn’t try. Every time someone contacted him about Tennis for Two, he would insist that they mention the FAS alongside it. At least the FAS itself was listening. Shortly after William’s death they named their national headquarters Higinbotham Hall.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Walt Disney World