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Inventor of First Videogame

Background.

Willy Higginbotham was a physicist. During World War II he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory to work on radar display. He contributed to research on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and helped develop a radar system associated with the B-29 bomber. After the war, Higginbotham worked for the U.S. government at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where every year there was an open house. People could come in and tour the nuclear research lab and see the equipment used and displays of work in progress. Higginbotham feared that visitors to the open house were bored.

A Visitors' Game.

As director of the instrumentation division of the lab, he decided to make something interesting for the public in 1958. He took spare parts from an oscilloscope and some other equipment around the lab, hooked it together, and...