Tennis for Two

William Higinbotham, head of the instrumentation division at Brookhaven National Laboratory, wanted visitors at the lab's annual open house not to be bored. Many of the exhibits were panels that showed nothing happening when you looked at them. Using an analog computer and an oscilloscope, he drew a tennis court seen from the side, with two knobs for hitting the ball back and forth. The design took a few hours; building it, with technician Dvorak, took three weeks. On the day, visitors lined up to play. This game was never patented. The story is often told as a matter of modesty — that he simply did not think it was a big deal — but the reason was more structural: he was a federal employee, and anything made as part of his job belonged to the government. Even if he had filed for a patent, it would not have benefited him. According to the laboratory's official page, he himself said he would rather be remembered for his work on radar displays and for the nuclear non-proliferation movement than for this game. The first screen in the world to entertain a person sat there, belonging to no one.