The earliest known patent for a game played on a screen
Two engineers at a television manufacturer applied for a patent on a missile game played with knobs against a cathode-ray tube, with targets printed on a plastic overlay taped to the glass. Nothing was ever manufactured.
Application filed January 25, 1947; U.S. Patent 2,455,992 was granted in December 1948
Entry 4 of 164 in the record
What happened
The design owed almost everything to radar work. Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann described analog circuits that moved a bright spot across a cathode-ray tube along an arcing path, with knobs to set the angle and the rate of climb. Since the tube could not draw anything else, targets came from a transparent overlay printed with aircraft and fixed over the screen. A hit was registered by defocusing the spot into a blur that stood in for an explosion. The apparatus kept no score and held no state, so a person had to judge the result.
Goldsmith worked for Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, a television maker with tubes and engineers to spare, and the application reads like an attempt to find a second market for both. The patent was granted in December 1948, and then nothing happened. No production run has ever been documented, the two men left no account of trying to license the design, and the working models built during development do not survive. What remains is the paperwork and the drawings that accompany it.
That is why this entry carries a caution. The application is the earliest known patent for an interactive game played on a screen, and in that narrow sense it is genuinely first. It is not evidence of a game that anyone played for amusement outside a laboratory, and it had no traceable influence on the people who built playable machines a decade later. Firsts of this kind matter as documents rather than as ancestors.
The world at the time
American television was just becoming a consumer business in 1947, with a handful of stations and several manufacturers racing to put receivers in homes. Cathode-ray tubes were plentiful and well understood after years of radar production, while digital computers were rare, enormous and reserved for calculation. An amusement built from analog circuits and a printed overlay was the practical option.
Historical significance
Here the idea of using a television tube for play is written down, dated and witnessed, twenty years before anyone built a product around it. The patent also shows how much early game hardware came out of wartime electronics, since the mechanism is essentially a radar display with the targets drawn on plastic.
What it changed
The device left no commercial descendants, but the record it created has been argued over ever since, by historians looking for origins and by lawyers looking for prior art in disputes over later gaming patents. Its overlay trick, printing artwork on plastic and fixing it to the glass, reappeared on the first home console for exactly the same reason.
Sources consulted
- Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device, U.S. Patent 2,455,992
- Electronic game
- Replay: The History of Video Games
Listed sources support the facts in this entry. Wording throughout is original to this archive. Read more about how entries are researched in sources and methodology.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026. Report a correction