William Higinbotham facts for kids

William Alfred Higinbotham (born October 22, 1910 – died November 10, 1994) was an American physicist. He was part of the team that created the first atomic bomb. Later, he became a strong supporter of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

He is also famous in the history of video games. In 1958, he created Tennis for Two. This was one of the first electronic games to use a screen and was an early interactive computer game.

Early Life and Education

William Higinbotham was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He grew up in Caledonia, New York. His father was a minister in the Presbyterian Church.

He went to Williams College and earned his degree in 1932. He then continued his studies at Cornell University. From 1941 to 1943, he worked on radar systems at MIT.

Career and Inventions

This picture shows the Tennis for Two game in 1958.

During World War II, William Higinbotham worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He led the lab's electronics team. His team developed important electronic parts for the first atomic bomb. They created the way the bomb would start and also tools to measure it.

Higinbotham also designed the radar screen for an experimental bomber plane called the B-28. After his work on nuclear weapons, he helped start a group called the Federation of American Scientists. This group worked to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. He was their first chairman.

From 1974 until he passed away in 1994, Higinbotham was an editor for a science magazine.

Creating Tennis for Two

In 1947, Higinbotham started working at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He stayed there until he retired in 1984.

In 1958, he was the head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven. For the lab's yearly open house, he created a computer game called Tennis for Two. The game was a tennis simulator shown on a special screen called an oscilloscope. Many people believe this game was one of the first video games ever made.

It took Higinbotham only a few weeks to finish the game. It was a huge hit at the open house! People loved playing it. Because it was so popular, Higinbotham made an improved version for the 1959 open house. This new version let players change the gravity. This meant they could pretend to play tennis on Jupiter or the Moon.

Higinbotham never got a patent for Tennis for Two. A patent is a special right that protects an invention. Even though he didn't patent the game, he did get over 20 other patents during his career.

In 1983, he remembered how he came up with the idea:

The instruction book that came with the computer described how to plot trajectories and bouncing shapes, for research. I thought, "This would make a good game." [Working with colleague Dave Potter], it took me four hours to design one and a technician a couple of weeks to put it together. ... Everybody stood in line to play [at the open house]. The other exhibits were pretty static, obviously. ... The game seemed to me sort of an obvious thing. Even if I had [wanted to patent it], the game would've belonged to the government.

Legacy and Recognition

In the 1980s, people started to realize how important Tennis for Two was. It played a big role in the early development of video games. In 1983, David Ahl, who had played the game as a teenager, wrote a magazine story calling Higinbotham the "Grandfather of Video Games."

Also in 1983, Frank Lovece interviewed Higinbotham for a story about video game history.

In 2011, Stony Brook University started the William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection. This collection gathers and saves items related to screen-based games. It specifically focuses on Higinbotham's work. It aims to collect and preserve information about Tennis for Two. The collection is also making a documentary about the game's history.

Even with all the attention on Tennis for Two, Higinbotham was not very interested in video games. He wanted to be remembered more for his work in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

After he passed away, many people asked about Tennis for Two. His son, William B. Higinbotham, told Brookhaven Lab: "It is important that you include information on his nuclear nonproliferation work. That was what he wanted to be remembered for." Because of his important work, the Federation of American Scientists named their main building Higinbotham Hall in 1994.

See also

In Spanish: William Higginbotham para niños