An oscilloscope tennis match becomes an open-house attraction

What happened

Visitors' day was an annual obligation, and the exhibits were usually static. William Higinbotham, who ran the instrumentation division and had built timing circuits for wartime weapons work, decided people should be able to touch something. Robert Dvorak did most of the construction. An analog computer solved the equations for a bouncing ball, transistor circuits shaped the display, and the result appeared on a small round oscilloscope screen: a horizontal line for the court, a short vertical line for the net, and a dot that fell and bounced convincingly.

Each player held a box with a knob to choose the angle of the return and a button to hit the ball. Missing was entirely possible, gravity became adjustable in a later version, and the line to play reportedly ran long enough that the laboratory brought the exhibit back the following year with a larger screen. Nobody involved treated it as an invention. The work belonged to a federal laboratory, Higinbotham did not believe the idea was patentable or particularly important, and no patent was filed and no unit was ever sold.

That decision came back in court. When Magnavox sued over its home console patents in the 1970s, defendants pointed to the Brookhaven game as evidence that the concept predated the claims. It did not carry the day, largely because the exhibit used laboratory instruments rather than a television receiver, which was what the disputed patents covered. The game is now frequently called the first video game, a title it can hold only with several qualifications, and one the laboratory itself has posed as a question rather than a claim.

The world at the time

Brookhaven was a national laboratory doing nuclear and high-energy physics research, and its open house existed to show taxpayers what went on behind the fence. Analog computers and oscilloscopes were everyday equipment there. Television sets were in most American homes by 1958, but connecting those two worlds occurred to nobody who had a commercial reason to act on it.

What it changed

The apparatus was taken apart and its components reused, so what survives is photographs, drawings and recollections. Its later fame came from the litigation and from the search for origins that accompanied the industry's growth. As an object lesson it is durable, since a laboratory exhibit assembled in a few weeks anticipated, without influencing, the ball-and-paddle games that sold fifteen years afterward.