The paternity of first video game history is not entirely clear. Canadian engineer Josef Kates created in 1950 ‘Bertie the Brain’, a gigantic computer that used vacuum valves and was capable of playing the popular game of tic-tac-toe. Kates designed and manufactured this computer with the intention of introducing during the Canadian National Show that year the thermionic valves he had designed, which were significantly more compact than conventional vacuum valves.
Kates was probably inspired during the development of his invention by the amusement device on a cathode ray tube invented three years earlier by the American physicists Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann. That amazing machine mimicked a radar screen like those used during World War II and I used an oscilloscope connected to a cathode ray tube to propose to the player to destroy various targets using projectiles. This game had no name, its interactivity was minimal and its graphics were extremely simple, but its purpose was undeniably playful.
This is the background of the first video game in history
Just one year after the creation of ‘Bertie the Brain’ engineers John Makepeace Bennett and Raymond Stuart-Williams, who worked at the British engineering company Ferranti, built ‘Nimrod’, a computer specifically created to run the ancient mathematical game of strategy Nim. In it, two players alternately remove a collection of stacked objects until only one remains. ‘Nimrod’ was unveiled during a technology show held in the UK in 1951.
‘Bertie the Brain’, ‘Nimrod’ and ‘OXO’ have deservedly gone down in history, but none of the three scrupulously fulfills all the conditions that a video game must respect
The next electronic game was not long in coming. In 1952 Alexander Shafto Douglas, who at the time was a doctoral student and shortly afterwards professor of computer science at the University of Cambridge, created ‘OXO’. It was about a game of tic-tac-toe that ran on top of EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), which was one of the first computers capable of storing the instructions of the programs it executed in an electronic memory.
As we have just seen, the candidacy for the title of the first video game in history is highly contested. ‘Bertie the Brain’, ‘Nimrod’ and ‘OXO’ are three very solid candidates, and for this reason and very deservedly they have gone down in video game history. However, there is a certain consensus that none of the three scrupulously complies all conditions that a video game must respect, either because they do not use animated graphics, or because they do not implement the interactivity that is assumed in a video game. This is precisely where the story of William Higinbotham y ‘Tennis for Two’.
William Higinbotham was one of the minds behind the first atomic bomb
William Alfred Higinbotham was born in 1910, in Connecticut (United States), and from his childhood he showed an innate curiosity and an inordinate interest in science. His parents were able to encourage and encourage his natural ability, which led him to study Physics at Williams College, a private university in the state of Massachusetts. He then continued his studies at Cornell University, which is unanimously considered one of the best universities in the world.
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Shortly after the start of World War II, Higinbotham was part of the MIT team (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) that I should create an advanced radar system give the US military an advantage in combat. His ability with Physics and his mastery of electronics had earned him an impeccable reputation, which led him to be recruited shortly after to be part of a secret mission that marked his life forever: the Manhattan Project.
William A. Higinbotham was one of the scientists who made possible the release of ‘Little Boy’, the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. He headed the Electronics Department at Los Alamos National Laboratory that designed the measurement instrumentation and ignition mechanism for the atomic bomb. He was also ultimately responsible for fine-tuning the B-28 experimental bomber radar.
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Higinbotham never fully recovered from the role it played in the outcome of World War II. When he became aware of his contribution to the development of the first nuclear weapons, he turned, like other scientists involved in the creation of the first atomic bombs, a very energetic activist against the proliferation of nuclear weapons that started when the Second World War ended and lasted throughout the Cold War.
Reconciliation with the world came from the hand of a tennis game
In 1947, just two years after the end of World War II, Higinbotham began work at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a research institution in Nuclear Physics run by the United States Department of Energy. He worked there until he retired in 1984. But, although he was not aware of it at the time, one of the culminating milestones of his career arrived in 1958, at a time when Higinbotham headed the laboratory’s Instrumentation Department.
Higinbotham managed to recreate a tennis match between two players using a Model 30 computer with vacuum valves and an oscilloscope
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A few years earlier, the laboratory managers had decided to hold an annual exhibition that would allow them to publicize the innovations that were being developed by their scientists, and Higinbotham had the idea of developing an electronic game that would serve as entertainment for the visitors of the exhibition . So, neither short nor lazy, a few weeks before the event he began to design and build it. Its purpose was recreate a tennis match that could be controlled by two players, and to do so he connected an oscilloscope to a Model 30 vacuum valve computer manufactured by Donner Scientific Company.
This photograph of the ‘Tennis for Two’ hardware, on the far left of the image, was taken during the exhibition held at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958. —
It had occurred to Higinbotham to take advantage of this computer’s ability to simulate wind-resistant trajectories to recreate a tennis match in the most realistic way possible, but he did not think that his invention would have any significance. He did not even know it when he found that it was the device that most attracted the attention of people who visited the 1958 exhibition, but its success encouraged him to refine it a little more and present it again at the event the following year with a peculiar improvement: that second version of ‘Tennis for Two’ allowed players adjust gravity intensity to simulate a tennis match on other celestial bodies, such as the Moon or Jupiter.
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Higinbotham never patented his invention. In fact, you were probably not aware of the significance of your innovation until the American engineer Ralph Baer developed the first video game console in history in 1972: la Odyssey de Magnavox. There is currently a solid consensus that William A. Higinbotham is the true father of video games, and his argument is that ‘Tennis for Two’, unlike ‘Bertie the Brain’, ‘OXO’ or ‘Nimrod’, incorporated animated graphics and implemented a greater interaction than that proposed by these last titles.
According to this argument Higinbotham’s game seems to fit better in the definition of video gameBut, beyond this premise, there is no doubt that these four devices have managed to go down in history in a very meritorious way as the true precursors of modern video games.
Images | Brookhaven National Laboratory
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