The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;—
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with the dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
—HENRY JOHN NEWBOLT, “VITAÏ LAMPADA”
When I was a kid, playtime consisted of one of two activities. Either I’d be running around outside playing “army” or I’d be indoors acting out battles between G.I. Joe troops and their sworn enemy, the evil terrorist organization Cobra. In the outdoor scenario, my friends and I would form teams and “fight” each other with plastic guns on the forested hillside across the street from my house. When it was too cold to go outside, I’d build Cobra fortresses in my basement out of couch cushions and boxes that the G.I. Joe troops would have to overrun.
What was the result of all this war-themed play? Well, I can safely say I’m a master of weapon sound effects. There isn’t a variation of “pow-pow-pow,” “budda-budda-budda” or “vooooosh” that I can’t mimic. But I wasn’t a particularly violent child, nor were my parents warmongers who encouraged such military-oriented leisure. No, I was just like millions of children—mainly boys—who happen to like playing war.
For as long as there have been weapons, children have fashioned their own makeshift versions from sticks and other found materials to play at being soldiers, pirates or policemen. Toy soldiers have been around almost as long; wooden carvings have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, while tin versions were first manufactured in Europe during the Middle Ages. The first plastic toy soldiers, or “army men,” were produced in the United States in the thirties and took off in the fifties after polyethylene became available. Toymaker Hasbro further capitalized on boys’ fascination with war-themed toys in 1963 when it introduced G.I. Joe, a thirty-centimetre-tall “action figure” influenced by the Second World War. The line sold millions of units while a newer, 9.5-centimetre iteration of G.I. Joe troops—the ones I loved so much—became the biggest-selling toy line of the eighties.1
While this link between war and toys has always existed, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that military technology began to drive the development of toys and games. Just as military-refined technology created playthings for adults (like cameras that could be used to shoot sexual escapades), a host of entrepreneurial inventors followed the lead of companies like Raytheon, Hormel and DuPont in exploiting their wartime inventions for post-war commercial success. For some of these entrepreneurs, it was all about money. For others, the motivations were deeper. Turning their inventions into toys and games allowed them to show off their creations publicly, a welcome and sought-after escape from the secretive world they normally worked in. Still others sought to entertain and amuse, perhaps as penance for the horrific deeds that some of their other creations were responsible for. Taken together, their efforts have gradually changed our attitudes toward war. Today, the tide has turned completely—the development of toys and games now drives the military. Remote-control robots incorporate the same controllers used in PlayStation and Xbox consoles, while troops familiarize themselves with combat zones by playing specially designed three-dimensional games that use the same technology as the Call of Duty and Tom Clancy titles found on the shelves of Walmart. In many ways, technology has turned war into a game.
Springs and Things
It started with simple inventions like the humble Slinky. In 1943 navy engineer Richard James was trying to figure out a way to stabilize sensitive instruments on board ships using springs. While tinkering in his home in Philadelphia, he accidentally knocked a steel torsion spring off a shelf. Rather than falling and landing in a heap, the spring—a coil with no compression or tension—“stepped” down from the shelf to a stack of books, then to a tabletop, then onto the floor, where it recoiled and stood upright. The engineer was even more astonished when he gently pushed the spring down a flight of stairs, only to see it gracefully “walk” down. His wife Betty was equally impressed by the spring’s eloquent movements and described them as “slinky,” which stuck as a name.
The couple thought they might have a hit toy on their hands so they formed a business, James Spring & Wire Company, and took out a loan, which Richard used to make a machine that wound Slinky units. They shopped the Slinky around to local department stores and found a taker in Gimbels Brothers, which set up a display—complete with an inclined plane to demonstrate the spring’s walking ability—in a downtown Philadelphia store during the 1945 Christmas season. The Jameses were flabbergasted when all four hundred units, which Richard had spent days winding, quickly sold out.2 The Slinky sensation was off and running.
The couple built a production factory in 1948 to cope with demand and eventually developed spinoff products such as the smaller Slinky Jr. and the Slinky Dog, plus non-spring toys like building kits. For the next decade, the Jameses watched the riches pour in. In 1960, however, Richard became unwound, so to speak. After suffering a nervous breakdown, he left Betty and their six children to join a religious cult in Bolivia. Betty was left to manage the company, which she renamed James Industries, as well as the large debts incurred by her husband’s religious donations. She recovered from the shocking turn of events and eventually took the Slinky to new heights, but it wasn’t easy. “He had given so much away that I was almost bankrupt. I sold the factory and decided to move from the Philadelphia area back to Altoona, where I grew up, with the business,” she later recalled.3
Betty helped create the toy’s memorable television ad campaign, which featured the catchy jingle that anyone born before the nineties is unlikely to forget: “It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, for fun it’s a wonderful toy. It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, it’s fun for a girl and a boy!” By its sixtieth anniversary in 2005 more than three hundred million Slinky toys had been sold.4 A few years earlier, on November 4, 2001, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania named the Slinky the Official State Toy of Philadelphia. Richard James, however, didn’t get to see his invention honoured—he died in Bolivia in 1974. The Slinky, meanwhile, went full circle with its military connection, when American soldiers in the Vietnam War found it could be used as an antenna for their mobile radios.
The Slinky sparked the imaginations of military minds and marketers alike, who realized that war technology might just be an untapped gold mine of toy possibilities. Silly Putty came next. When the Japanese occupied the rubber-producing islands of the Pacific during the early forties, the Allies found themselves facing a potential shortage of vehicle tires and boot soles. Credit for the invention of Silly Putty is disputed; Earl Warrick, a scientist working for Dow Corning, claimed to have created it, but Crayola, the company that now owns the trademark, considers James Wright the proper inventor. Wright, a Scottish engineer working in General Electric’s labs in New Haven, Connecticut, came up with a potential solution to the rubber problem when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil in a test tube. The new substance had rubber-like qualities and a very high melting temperature, but it also bounced, stretched further and resisted mold. The putty-like goo, however, wasn’t solid enough to replace rubber, so it sat out the war. GE sent the substance to scientists and engineers around the world after the war, but eventually gave up and declared it had no practical use.5 (The Allied rubber problem, meanwhile, was solved in the late stages of the war when a number of companies, including tire makers Firestone and Goodrich, came up with a synthetic elastomer under a patent-sharing program overseen by the American government.)
Ultimately, GE’s substance didn’t have to travel far to find a use. Ruth Fallgetter, a toy store owner in New Haven, got her hands on one of the samples that were circulating and immediately saw its potential as a plaything. She brought in Peter Hodgson, a local marketing consultant, to help sell it.
Children immediately fell in love with the putty because of its pliability and ability to copy pictures and text when pressed against newspaper and comics pages. Packaged in a clear case with a price tag of two dollars, the putty outsold just about everything in the store. But Fallgetter wasn’t convinced of its long-term viability, so she left it to her partner to take further. Eyeing the Slinky’s success, Hodgson bounced around potential names before trademarking one he thought represented the goo perfectly: Silly Putty. He bought production rights and a batch of the substance from GE, then packaged it in plastic eggs, since Easter was on the way. He introduced Silly Putty to potential distributors at the 1950 International Toy Fair in New York, but once again it flopped—nearly all of the toy marketers at the fair advised Hodgson to give up. The persistent entrepreneur didn’t listen, however, and eventually convinced department chain Neiman Marcus and bookseller Doubleday to sell the substance for $1 per egg in their stores. Hodgson was convinced Silly Putty was a great toy because it sparked children’s imaginations. “It really has a sort of personality,’’ he later said, “and it reflects your personality.... A lot of what makes it work is that the stuff in the egg is only the half of it.’’6
Silly Putty sold modestly until it made an appearance in The New Yorker, which quoted a Doubleday employee as saying it was the “most terrific item it has handled since Forever Amber,” a bestselling 1944 novel.7 More than a quarter million orders rolled in from stores around the country in the three days following the story’s publication.8
Hodgson and his goo weren’t out of the woods yet. The Korean War and the American government’s rationing of silicone, the main ingredient in Silly Putty, almost put him out of business in 1951. He had to scale back production, but when restrictions were lifted a year later, his business went straight to the moon, literally. American sales boomed throughout the fifties and Silly Putty also became a hit in several European countries. But Hodgson scored his biggest publicity coup yet in 1968, when it was reported that astronauts on the Apollo 8 moon mission were using it to secure tools in zero gravity. The entrepreneur’s tenacity had finally paid off and he rode Silly Putty to riches. When he died in 1976 Hodgson left behind an estate worth $140 million. Crayola bought the rights to Silly Putty in 1977 and ten years later was selling more than two million eggs annually.9
Rocket Doll
As the sixties approached, toys started to become more complex, and so did the technology behind them. The all-time bestselling toy, the Barbie doll, was the product of space-age military thinking. It also had lascivious if not outright pornographic origins. The doll was inspired by Lilli, a cartoon character from the German tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung. Bild, as it is now known, was founded in Hamburg in 1952 for people with poor reading skills. Like many tabloids, it made heavy use of photographs and featured news stories that were often sensationalistic and based on dubious facts. Lilli, a tall, statuesque character with platinum-blond hair created by artist Reinhard Beuthien, fit in well with the newspaper’s lowbrow editorial direction. She was unabashedly sexual, a gold digger, an exhibitionist and a floozy with “the body of a Vargas Girl, the brains of Pia Zadora and the morals of Xaviera Hollander,” in the words of one Barbie biographer.10 In her first cartoon, Lilli sat in a fortune teller’s tent and, after being told she’d meet a wealthy and good-looking suitor, asked, “Can’t you tell me the name and address of this rich and handsome man?” Another exploit found her naked in her female friend’s apartment concealing her vital parts with a newspaper, saying, “We had a fight and he took back all the presents he gave me,” while yet another had a policeman warn her that her two-piece bathing suit was illegal. “Oh,” she replied, “and in your opinion, which part should I take off?”11
In 1955, looking to cash in on Lilli’s popularity, the newspaper commissioned German toy maker Greiner & Hauser to make an eleven-and-a-half-inch doll, complete with ponytail and removable outfits, aimed at adults. The curvy dolls were dressed in low-cut blouses, stiletto heels, skimpy skirts and shorts, and came bundled with innuendo-laced packaging and marketing. “Whether more or less naked, Lilli is always discreet,” read one promotional brochure; as a “mascot for your car,” Lilli promises a “swift ride,” read another. Her wardrobe made her “the star of every bar.”12 The doll sold well to German men as a gag gift, but Greiner & Hauser eventually toned down its overt sexuality to appeal to the larger children’s market.
Ruth Handler first discovered the Lilli doll while on vacation in Europe. The president of American toy maker Mattel had been thinking of introducing an adult doll after seeing her daughter Barbara playing with her own paper cutout creations. Barbara had not been imagining her paper dolls in childish situations, like playing in a sandbox or skipping rope with friends, but rather in much older scenarios, such as high school, college or an adult career. Handler believed there was a market in going against the conventional wisdom of the time, that young girls were only interested in playing with young dolls. Intrigued by Lilli, Handler bought three: one for herself and two for her daughter.
Mattel had been started in southern California in 1945 by Harold “Matt” Matson and Handler’s husband, Elliot; the company name was a contraction of the founders’ names.
Matson, however, decided against gambling his life savings on the company and sold out to his partner the following year, a move he surely rued after Mattel became a toy juggernaut. Ruth, a stenographer for Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, quit her job and came on board as president. Unlike Matson, the Handlers were every bit the entrepreneurs—and big believers in plastics and other futuristic technology. During the war, Elliot built furniture out of Plexiglas in his garage, then expanded to plastic jewellery, candleholders and other novelties. Mattel’s first hit toy was the Ukedoodle, a plastic ukulele, in 1947, followed in 1955 by its very own toy weapon, the Burp Gun. By the time Ruth discovered Lilli, Mattel was already a modest success, with a net worth of $500,000.13
Elliot’s passion for futurism was stoked when he was approached in the early fifties by Jack Ryan, a Yale-educated engineer working for Raytheon, with an idea for a toy transistor radio. Handler didn’t like the idea, but he was impressed with Ryan’s knowledge of transistors and electrical circuitry and believed the engineer had the “space-age savvy” to make his own high-tech fantasies real.14 The entrepreneurial Ryan, on the other hand, wasn’t content with his role at Raytheon, where he was working on a team designing the Hawk surface-to-air missile. Handler wooed Ryan away from Raytheon with a contract that promised royalties on every toy patent he came up with.
Ryan became better known for his colourful and extravagant sex life than his engineering skills.15 After he achieved success with Mattel, he spared no expense in building a hedonistic pleasure palace in California that would have made Hugh Hefner envious. On a five-acre estate in Bel Air that once belonged to actor George Hamilton, the engineer constructed a cross between a castle and a theme park, a mansion complete with turrets, tapestries, eighteen bathrooms, seven kitchens and a tree house that could seat twelve for dinner. By dialling particular numbers on one of the 150 telephones around the mansion, Ryan could activate a waterfall, light up the tennis court, close the front gate, turn on the stereo system or order caviar for the tree house, which had its own chandelier and panoramic view of Los Angeles.
He threw frequent and lavish parties—182 in one year, or one every two days—complete with jugglers, fortune tellers, handwriting analysts, musicians, go-go dancers, minstrels and harpsichordists. Drunken guests bounced up and down on a trampoline or fed the ducks, geese and pony kept on the grounds. Ryan also housed the twelve UCLA students he had recruited to be part of his Mattel design team and courted numerous high-society and celebrity mistresses.16 In the basement, he put together a black-painted dungeon decked out in black fox fur, and cuddled with his numerous girlfriends under wolf-fur covers in a guest room bedecked with mirrored walls.
Ryan divorced his first wife, ironically named Barbara, and married actress Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1976. The two never moved in together, however, and Gabor soon discovered Ryan’s wild side. While the couple was honeymooning in Japan, Ryan paid their guide to have sex with Gabor while he held business meetings with a toy manufacturer, much to his wife’s shock and displeasure. “Jack, my new husband (it now appeared) was a full-blown seventies-style swinger into wife-swapping and sundry sexual pursuits as a way of life,” Gabor recalled in her biography. It took seven months for Gabor to tire of the fact that both Ryan’s ex-wife Barbara and two mistresses were living in his mansion. The couple ended their marriage as abruptly as it had begun. “Jack’s sex life would have made the average Penthouse reader blanch with shock,” Gabor said. “I wanted no part whatsoever in any of it.”17
Ryan’s intersection with the Lilli doll was the perfect circumstance, a twist of fate that provided him with the fortune he needed to indulge his wild desires. Just as he was leaving for Tokyo in July 1957 to find a manufacturer for some mechanical toys he had designed, Ruth Handler passed him her Lilli doll. “See if you can get this copied,” she said.18 Ryan landed a deal with Kokusai Boeki Kaisha to manufacture the doll, then set about redesigning Lilli so she would look less like a “German streetwalker.”19 Ryan’s modifications were both technical and cosmetic. Aside from convincing KBK to use a new rotation-moulding process to create a softer doll, he also designed and patented new arm and leg joints that gave Mattel’s toy greater flexibility. The expertise he had gained in building miniaturized moving parts for Raytheon’s missile projects came in handy when designing the doll’s joints, which would have to stand up to the rigours of constant play. The levels of stress that adolescent girls could place on their toys weren’t unlike the forces of gravity, velocity and drag that missiles had to deal with.
Ryan also did away with Lilli’s pouty lips, heavy eyelashes, widow’s peak hairdo and built-in heels. The newly redesigned doll, named Barbie in honour of the Handlers’ daughter, was introduced to the American Toy Fair in New York in March 1959. Backed by a major marketing campaign, Barbie-mania exploded. Girls loved the doll’s wide assortment of accessories and wardrobe and the poseability offered by Ryan’s joint designs. Mattel sold more than 350,000 dolls in the first year of production, a number that mushroomed over the next four decades to more than one billion sold across 150 countries. The Handlers cashed in and took Mattel public in 1960, making it the world’s biggest toy maker and a member of the exclusive Fortune 500 club. By the late-2000s, the company proudly boasted that three Barbie dolls were sold every second.20
Ryan wasn’t finished, however. While Barbie was starting her meteoric rise, he put his transistor expertise to use by creating a talking version of the doll. Again, only an engineer schooled in the miniaturization of weapons design could have pulled it off. The result was Chatty Cathy, a doll that spoke eleven phrases—such as “Tell me a story” and “I love you”—when you pulled a drawstring on her back. The doll, which went on sale in 1960, had to be larger than Barbie because of the miniature phonograph record player secured in its abdomen. The record was driven by a metal coil that was wound when the drawstring was pulled. Chatty Cathy proved popular too and was soon second only to Barbie in sales. The drawstring-activated voice function revolutionized the entire toy market when Mattel incorporated it into later products, including its Bugs Bunny series and the See ’n Say educational line.
The former Raytheon engineer also had a hand in creating Hot Wheels, Mattel’s second-most successful toy line overall. In the early sixties, Ryan’s design team was searching for a way to duplicate Barbie’s success with boys. Elliot Handler found the solution when he discovered one of his grandchildren playing with a Matchbox die-cast toy car made by Britain’s Lesney Products. Handler decided Mattel needed to get into the car business and hired Harry Bentley Bradley, a designer who worked for Cadillac, to help Ryan create a line of toy vehicles. Handler loved Bradley’s own real-world car, a customized Chevy El Camino with red striped tires, mag wheels and fuel injector stacks protruding from the hood. He told his new designer to use his own “hot wheels” as the basis of the toy line. Handler’s plan had one big problem—Lesney’s Matchbox line already had a commanding share of the market. Mattel’s marketing department warned him that if he wanted to compete, he would need to differentiate his product somehow. Ryan, Bradley and the rest of the design team came to the rescue.
They found that kids liked to race their cars, but the Lesney cars and their rivals didn’t roll very well. Ryan’s team designed a bent-axle torsion bar suspension system, which was essentially a miniaturized version of the one used in real cars, with inner wheel ball bearings made of a plastic called Delrin, synthesized by DuPont in 1952. The outer tires were made of nylon and moulded into a slightly conical shape, which reduced friction by limiting the wheels to a single point of surface contact. The resulting toy cars had a little bounce to them, much like real vehicles, and rolled very fast.
The team also perfected “Spectraflame,” a new method of painting that coated the cars with a gleaming silver layer of zinc, then covered them with a thin layer of candy-coloured hues to reflect the “California custom” look Handler wanted. Mattel’s cars were not only faster than their Matchbox counterparts, their snazzy paint jobs stood in stark contrast to the drab enamel shades of their rivals. It was like comparing Ferraris to Edsels.
Even before Hot Wheels made their debut at the New York Toy Fair in 1968, they were a huge hit. Mattel estimated an initial production run of ten to fifteen million cars, but when the toys were showcased to Kmart shortly before the fair, the retail chain immediately ordered fifty million.21 Hot Wheels joined Barbie and Chatty Cathy as the lynchpins of Mattel’s toy empire.
In the sixties, Ryan tried unsuccessfully to poach some old cohorts from Raytheon to join his design team. Raytheon archivist Norman Krim remembers visiting Ryan in California to entertain one of his job offers. He was struck not so much by the discussion of possible employment, but by some of the engineer’s talking doll prototypes. “He had a bunch of Barbie dolls with tape recorders [in them] that were all saying very nasty four-letter words,” Krim says. “He was a crazy guy.”22
Atomic Tennis
Mattel’s products were a step toward more complex toys, but they were nothing compared to what came after. I visited the site of the next big development on a chilly evening in September 2008. My arrival at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of the world’s best-regarded science and technology hubs, did not go as I expected. While ostensibly “in New York,” the lab is actually far out on the eastern end of Long Island, a two-hour train ride from downtown Manhattan. From the train stop, it’s a further $25 cab ride—there is no other public transportation servicing the lab. When I got to the front gate at 10 P.M., it turned out there had been a mix-up over which day I was supposed to arrive. Apparently I was early, officially by two hours, and the stern security guard refused to let me in. I had little choice but to sit shivering on a bench off to the side of a small clearing in the forest and wait for midnight to arrive. Luckily a family of deer popped into the clearing for a late-night snack of grass, which provided me some small measure of entertainment. One thought kept echoing through my head: “I can’t believe this is where video games were invented.”
Brookhaven was established on the site of Camp Upton, a wartime army base, by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947 to continue the nuclear research begun by the Manhattan Project. The base was chosen because of its remote location, which was perfect for the nature of the volatile—and potentially destructive—research that would go on there. My visit coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Tennis for Two, an invention many computer historians consider to be the first real video game. The lab’s public relations department was planning a big media event where a reconstructed version of the game would be shown off side by side with the latest Nintendo Wii tennis game, a juxtaposition to show just how far the technology has come in fifty years.
While Peter Hodgson, Richard James and Jack Ryan all looked to profit from inventions or knowledge developed from military origins, William Higinbotham had a distinctly different outlook in creating Tennis for Two. Higinbotham was a graduate student in physics at Cornell University when the Second World War broke out. Karl Compton, president of MIT and a key member of Vannevar Bush’s newly minted National Defense Research Council, wasted no time in recruiting the promising young physicist to his Radiation Lab, where research was under way on what would become radar. While at MIT, Higinbotham likely crossed paths with Percy Spencer and his Raytheon team, who eventually took over mass production of radar.
With most of the pressing research work on the detection system done by the middle of the war, Higinbotham was recruited by J. Robert Oppenheimer to head up the electronics division of the Manhattan Project, where he created the timing circuits for the atomic bomb. Higinbotham witnessed the test firing of the first bomb in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico, in a shelter thirty-eight kilometres from ground zero. Like many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, he was deeply troubled by the fruits of his labour. After the first test blast, Higinbotham and the other observers got into their transport trucks and rode back to the Los Alamos base in complete silence. No one had anything to say.23 However, fellow physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, a specialist in mass spectrometers, was considerably more vocal than his colleagues later on. The blast was a “foul and awesome display,” he told Oppenheimer, and “now we are all sons of bitches.”24
Even before the bombs were dropped on Japan, scientists at several American research facilities were organizing into protest groups to speak out against the actual use of the weapons. Independent associations formed at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago, the Clinton Laboratory at Oak Ridge, the Substitute Alloy Materials Lab at Columbia University and, under Higinbotham’s leadership, at Los Alamos. When the war ended and the scattered researchers and engineers were finally allowed to communicate with each other, they banded together to form the Federation of Atomic Scientists, a lobby group that sought to limit proliferation of nuclear weapons. Higinbotham was named the first chairman and later its executive director. One of his first actions was the expansion of membership beyond just those who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which necessitated a name change, to the Federation of American Scientists. In a New York Times Magazine editorial, Higinbotham declared the reality of the bomb and outlined what the world had to do to avoid annihilation:
The longer we [scientists] lived with this problem the more alarmed we became.... The first thing we must understand about these forces is that against them there is no defense except world law. There will be no defense in the future, not until man is perfect. We must seek world control of atomic energy because it offers humanity its only measure of safety.25
Higinbotham served as the head of the FAS for two years before stepping down into an executive secretary role, but he continued as a tireless campaigner against nuclear proliferation until his death in 1994. It was only in the eighties, when Cold War tension between the United States and the USSR—and the threat of nuclear destruction—reached its zenith, that he felt his warnings were being taken seriously. “It’s taken over thirty years, but the message is finally beginning to get through,” he said.26
If he were alive today, Higinbotham would probably be disappointed to learn that he is better remembered for his contribution to video games than to nuclear non-proliferation. When the war ended, he went to work at Brookhaven as the head of the instrumentation team, which was responsible for building displays and measurement devices for the facility’s research divisions. The lab, with its idyllic forest setting and mission to better control nuclear power, was the perfect home for the pacifist scientist. Over the next decade, Higinbotham and his team built all manner of electronic tools, from radiation detectors and a device that could measure a rat’s heart rate to computer monitors that tracked the trajectories of missiles.
Residents of Long Island and New York, however, were uneasy about Brookhaven and the work that was going on there. Atomic research was a completely new science that had been shown to produce devastating results, and many people believed one slight mishap could obliterate the entire region in a mushroom cloud. In 1950 the facility tried to dispel those fears by holding annual public open houses to show that its research was in fact safe. The problem, however, was that much of the lab’s work was top secret, so visitors were restricted to viewing photographs and inert equipment, which Higinbotham felt were boring.
Higinbotham was a fun-loving character, a chain-smoker who loved to liven up the lab’s frequent parties with his frenetic accordion playing.27 Many of the staffers at Brookhaven were out-of-towners who only socialized during weekend beach parties. Higinbotham went out of his way to keep their spirits up. He was also a self-confessed pinball junkie, which explains why he came up with Tennis for Two.
Although digital computers were starting to gain traction in the fifties, Higinbotham designed his game on an older analogue machine, which used on-off pulses to represent data. His box, about as big as a current-day microwave oven, was full of vacuum tubes and was programmed to simulate a game of tennis as seen from a side view, complete with varying ball trajectories and speeds. The computer was hooked up to an oscilloscope, a round screen twelve centimetres in diameter that was normally used to display voltages. A green horizontal line represented the court, while a shorter vertical line in the middle was the net. Two small controller boxes were also hooked up to the computer; each had a dial that allowed the holder to direct the angle of the ball and a button that hit the ball when pressed. The entire design took Higinbotham three weeks to create. The result was effectively the first video game.
There were electronic games before Tennis for Two, but none of them were proper video games. A 1947 game invented by American physicists Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann simulated missile shooting, but required a plastic overlay to be placed on the screen, because the computers of the time were incapable of drawing graphics. Similarly, in 1951 British firm Ferrant designed the Nimrod digital computer to play a game called “Nim,” but the display consisted only of a bank of lights that blinked on and off. OXO, also known as Noughts and Crosses, designed in 1952 for the EDSAC military computer at the University of Cambridge, was perhaps the closest thing to a video game as it displayed graphics for tic-tac-toe on a cathode ray tube, but the X’s and O’s didn’t move. Higinbotham’s design was the first to feature moving graphics and incorporate what would become the three essentials of a video game: a computer, a graphical display and a controller apparatus.
When Tennis for Two made its debut at Brookhaven’s visitor day on October 18, 1958, it was one of the first real, practical displays of what computers could do. While Art Linkletter had used the massive UNIVAC computer to match couples on his television show during the mid-fifties, Tennis for Two was the first opportunity for the general public to get their hands on one. Hordes of awestruck people lined up that Saturday afternoon to try out the game. Other lab departments looked on in envy as virtual tumbleweeds rolled by their deserted displays. The game was rolled out again the following year with some improvements, including a bigger screen and variable gravity settings to simulate what playing tennis on other planets might be like. After that, Tennis for Two was dismantled, its component parts put to other uses. Despite the game’s popularity with visitors, Higinbotham never patented it or sought to commercialize it.
Robert Dvorak Jr., whose father built the game from Higinbotham’s designs, doesn’t believe the physicist knew what forces he had set in motion. “The whole idea was to show the public what a computer was, what it could do,” he told me. “From the perspective of society, he had no idea what he was doing.” Moreover, the cost of the equipment involved—about $20,000 by today’s standards—precluded any thoughts of creating a commercial product. “The concept that this was something that could be within reach of Joe Consumer would never have occurred to anybody,” Dvorak said.28 Higinbotham himself later admitted that he never thought to patent Tennis for Two, and even if he had, the rights to the game would have belonged to the United States government. “We knew it was fun and saw some potential in it at the time, but it wasn’t something the government was interested in,” he recalled in 1983. “It’s a good thing, too. Today all video game designers would have to licence their games from the federal government.”29
Dots, Blips and Blobs
The first landmark video game patent eventually went to Ralph Baer, a German-born Jewish inventor who escaped his native country just weeks before the Nazis launched the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938. Only sixteen years old when he arrived in New York with his parents and sister, Baer got a job repairing radios. When the war started, he was drafted and assigned to Military Intelligence, where he became an expert on small arms and won the army’s Marksmen’s Medal. While serving in England, he caught pneumonia and spent the latter part of the war in a military hospital. When he returned to the United States in 1946, the young veteran had difficulty getting into colleges because he hadn’t finished high school in Germany. He finally caught a break with the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago, which accepted him on the basis of strong entrance exams. Baer graduated with a Bachelor of Science in television engineering, a rare degree at the time. He then worked for a number of smaller firms, including satellite equipment manufacturer Loral Electronics, where he built his first television set.
Baer found his destiny in 1956 when he accepted a job at Sanders Associates, a defence contractor founded by former Raytheon employees in Nashua, New Hampshire, a tiny town an hour north of Boston. He was hired to manage the electronics design department and was soon promoted to oversee the entire equipment design division, a role that gave him a budget of several million dollars and more than five hundred staffers. While his day job required him to work on airborne radar components and other defence electronics, Baer couldn’t help but use some of his newfound resources to dabble in his real passion: television. While at Loral, he had become convinced that television sets could be used for more than just airing broadcasts. Indeed, he had managed to project test patterns onto the set he had built for the company in 1951, and found he could actually move the images around on the screen. That rudimentary concept—controlling images on a television screen—was the theoretical basis for video games.
At Sanders, Baer experimented with the idea further. In 1966 he created what he called the first-ever “television game.” It was a simple demonstration that allowed two players to each control a dot of light on a blank screen with a handheld controller. The fun came from chasing each other’s dot around—a concept that seems laughable by today’s standards. Baer got semi-official backing from Sanders when he showed the game to his superior, who granted him $5,000 to further develop the idea. Two years and six designs later, Baer had his masterpiece: the Brown Box, a console that displayed a variety of rudimentary sports, maze and quiz games on a television screen. The system ran on batteries and the games were black and white. Most consisted of blobs of light moving around the screen; the controllers were big blocks with moving knobs. The console was hard-wired with all the games, and players switched between them by removing and inserting circuit cards, which connected different series of jumpers inside the machine. In homage to its creator’s skill as a marksman, the Box also supported a plastic gun peripheral that shot at dots of light on the screen. As basic as it was, the Brown Box was the world’s first video game console.
Selling it to Sanders’s board of directors, however, was not easy. “Talk about long faces,” Baer recalls. Only a few board members saw any future in the Brown Box, while the rest wanted to know how it would make money. “What the hell did I know about making money on commercial products?” Baer laughs. “I’d been in military electronics for ten years.”
He finally convinced the board to support the console by spelling out the sheer potential market size—more than forty million households in the United States had television sets, and there were least that many in other countries. Surely some of those homes were interested in doing something more with their TVs.30 Satisfied with his logic, the board gave Baer the go-ahead to shop around for a licensee to manufacture and market the console. Baer’s first choice was the cable television industry, but he failed to find any takers. After showing the console to a host of television manufacturers, including RCA, Sylvania, GE and Motorola, he finally got a bite from Magnavox. The two sides signed a licensing deal and the Brown Box was rebranded as the Magnavox Odyssey. It hit stores in August 1972 with a $100 price tag, effectively launching the home video-game market, but it didn’t meet with the success anyone was hoping for. Magnavox sold only a hundred thousand in its first year, mainly because of poor marketing; many consumers were turned off by the mistaken belief that the Odyssey worked only with Magnavox televisions.
The real money for Sanders and Magnavox didn’t end up coming from console sales, but from patent infringement. In 1973 Baer got a patent for a “Television Gaming and Training Apparatus,” which covered “the generation, display, manipulation and use of symbols or geometric figures upon the screen of the television receivers for the purpose of training simulation, for playing games, and for engaging in other activities by one or more participants.”31 Atari was the first violator when it launched its Pong home console in 1975. Pong was more successful than the Odyssey, primarily because of better marketing; the boxes were clearly marked “Works with any television set.” Atari’s success prompted a wave of Pong knock-offs from a host of companies, including pinball maker Bally Midway, which ultimately resulted in Sanders and Magnavox bringing a lawsuit to bear in 1976.
Sanders and Magnavox argued that Atari president Nolan Bushnell had ripped off their technology. And they had the smoking gun to prove it: Bushnell had attended a Brown Box demonstration in California in May 1972, three months before the Odyssey launched, as evidenced by his signature in the event’s guest book. Bushnell settled with Sanders, becoming the company’s first licensee outside of Magnavox. Baer, Sanders and Magnavox went on to sue virtually every company that attempted to get into the market, including Mattel, Coleco, Seeburg, Activision and Sega. They won or favourably settled every case after a slew of lengthy disputes. “They ran longer than any Broadway play ever did,” Baer jokes.
The Brown Box inventor eventually went toe to toe with Higinbotham when Nintendo tried to invalidate Sanders’s patent in the mid-eighties. Higinbotham was called as a witness by Nintendo to establish “prior art”—that Tennis for Two was in fact the first video game. The courts, however, again sided with Baer, who maintained that Tennis for Two was a simple oscilloscope-based ballistics demonstration and not a viable video-game system. The victory over Nintendo underscored once and for all that Sanders had first legal rights to video games, and that all companies dealing in the market going forward would have to pay the military contractor licensing fees until its patent expired in 1990.
Who knew that when I was playing Asteroids as a kid, I was helping to design weapons?
Miniaturization Goes Massive
While many inventors turned from working on weapons to creating playthings for children, some got into an entirely different line of toys. One particularly key invention, the transistor, appeared right after the Second World War to lay the foundations of the technology industry, not to mention just about all the electronic toys we see around us today.
Leading the way was William Shockley, an American born in England and raised in Palo Alto, a small town south of San Francisco. Shockley was by many accounts a terrible child, “ill-tempered, spoiled, almost uncontrollable, who made his doting parents’ lives miserable.”32 Although he continued to be a difficult person into adulthood, Shockley proved to be a very smart and adept inventor. In the thirties, he got his degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology and his doctorate from MIT. Shortly before the war began he went to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, where he was tasked with improving the vacuum tube, a device resembling a light bulb that could amplify, switch or otherwise modify electrons flowing through it. Vacuum tubes were the “brains” of many early electronic devices such as radios and huge, room-sized analogue computers, but they were clumsy processors at best. To relay the binary language of ones and zeros that electronics relied on, vacuum tubes had to be turned on and off—when they were on, they transmitted a one, when they were off, a zero. The process was slow and the tubes burned out frequently from the constant switching (or if an insect landed on a bulb, hence the term “bug,” used today to mean “glitch”).
Improving the tubes would have to wait, though. When the Second World War broke out, Shockley took an interest in radar development and toured the front lines to train pilots to use their new electronic targeting systems. Shockley was so respected for his mathematical prowess that, near the end of the war, he was asked to predict the casualties American forces could expect in a full-out invasion of Japan. His report ended up influencing one of the biggest decisions in human history: his calculation that a staggering 400,000 to 800,000 American soldiers would be killed in such an attack made the decision to drop the atomic bomb an easy one.
When the war ended, Shockley returned to Bell Labs and the vacuum tube. With his team, he experimented with different semiconducting materials to see which moved electricity most efficiently. The group eventually settled on germanium and gold, and in 1947 they unveiled the transistor, a chip made from these semiconductor materials which, after some improvements, worked far more efficiently and was much less fragile than the glass vacuum tube. No sooner was it invented, though, than a fight broke out over ownership. Bell Labs patented the device with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, two of Shockley’s team members, but left his name off the paperwork. There were also questions about whether the team had improperly referenced an earlier patent filed in Canada on a similar device, which was never built. A disgruntled Shockley, described by Time magazine as “a very competitive and sometimes infuriating man,” wanted his proper due and set to work on an improved transistor, which he patented himself and unveiled in 1951.33 Two years later, after being passed up for promotion at Bell Labs because of his difficult personality, he returned to his roots as a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. One of his friends there, Arnold Beckman, convinced Shockley to set up his own company as a division of his firm, Beckman Instruments. In 1955 Shockley Semiconductor opened its doors for business in Mountain View, only a few kilometres from Palo Alto, where Shockley had grown up.
Ironically, Shockley gave rise to a new epoch, not with something he did but with something he didn’t do. After conducting some experiments with silicon as a semiconductor, he decided against using the material, much to the dismay of several of his researchers, who believed it to be superior to other substances. Eight of his scientists, whom Shockley dubbed the “traitorous eight,” split from his company over the decision and formed their own firm, Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1958 the new firm succeeded in building the first integrated circuit, which packed a number of transistors onto one miniaturized chip. (Texas Instruments, based in Dallas, coincidentally made the same breakthrough at about the same time.) This was the beginning of microelectronics and the official cornerstone of what would come to be known as Silicon Valley. Two of the “traitors,” Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, left Fairchild in 1968 to form their own company, Intel, in nearby Santa Clara. Today, of course, Intel is the dominant maker of microprocessors while Moore’s famous 1965 prediction that the number of transistors that could be packed onto an integrated circuit roughly doubles every two years has become a “law” that still holds true.
The Silicon Valley companies ushered in a new way of doing technological research—and they added a business element to it. While many of their early efforts went to building computers, radar and other electronics for the military, the companies were civilian-run and profit-driven. They all had much bigger consumer markets in mind, which in the early seventies started attracting venture capitalists. Soon all the pieces for an electronics revolution were in place. With the nearby technologically minded Caltech and Stanford universities feeding them brainpower, venture capitalists pumping in funding, a healthy competitiveness and a burgeoning public appetite for electronic gizmos, the valley-area companies quickly discovered that silicon was indeed just as good as gold. Technology firms sprouted up by the thousands, not just to build silicon chips but also to handle the various spinoff businesses these created. Foreign electronics companies such as Germany’s SAP and Japan’s Hitachi moved in, and when the internet started to take off, no one thought to locate themselves anywhere other than the valley.
Half a century after Shockley set up shop there, Silicon Valley is home to just about every major technology company in the world: Google (based in Shockley’s old stomping grounds of Mountain View), Apple, Intel, AMD, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Yahoo, Symantec, eBay and Facebook, just to name a few.
The transistor, meanwhile, is the father of the computer chips we know today. Many technologists consider it to be the greatest invention of the twentieth century. As one industry analyst puts it, “It has changed society. Look at transportation, computers, government, finance, manufacturing ... it’s affected them all. Look at the change in the productivity of the whole economy. It’s probably doubled from what it would have been without transistors.”34
It was and continues to be the lynchpin behind many electronics and has fuelled the success and growth of many companies. Indeed, Japanese inventor Masaru Ibuka was so impressed with the transistor when he visited Bell Labs in the early fifties that he asked his country’s government to help him pay the fee to license the technology. He brought the transistor back to Japan and used it to build a portable radio, which proved to be the first successful product for his small electronics firm. That company was Sony, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The scientific community recognized the impact the transistor would have soon after it was invented and honoured Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain with the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956. Shockley, never one to shy away from self-aggrandizement, said in his acceptance speech that the transistor was indeed the beginning of an entirely new way of thinking: “It seems highly probable that once the phenomena of surface states are thoroughly understood from a scientific point of view, many useful suggestions will arise as to how this knowledge may be employed to make better devices.”35
Like many other brilliant but eccentric inventors, Shockley did much to ruin his legacy. While Slinky inventor Richard James converted to a religious cult and Tupperware designer Earl Tupper became a hermit, Shockley kicked his disgrace into gear when he started airing his views on eugenics. In the sixties he began to share his theories that intelligence was an inherited trait and that lower reproduction rates among smarter people were effectively making humanity stupider. Shockley took his theory further by saying that unskilled blacks had the highest reproduction rates in the United States and that over time, the black population would become even less intelligent than it already was.
To those ends, he donated his sperm to a bank devoted to preserving humanity’s best genes and advocated paying people with IQs under a hundred to undergo voluntary sterilization. To say that Shockley’s views were shocking would be an understatement. During the latter years of his life, he was largely written off by the media as a racist and often called a Nazi and a Hitlerite. He was hardly able to make any public appearances without demonstrators showing up. It all caught up to him in 1989 when he died alone, accompanied only by his wife, Emmy. His children found out about his death in the newspapers.
Still, it’s hard to forget that William Shockley was indirectly responsible for many of the toys and gadgets we love today; and without him Silicon Valley might not exist.
War Becomes “Freaking Cool”
For decades, sociologists and psychologists have argued that violent video games and war-related toys such as G.I. Joe (made possible through the Barbie miniaturization pioneered by Mattel) are a deliberate form of psychological brainwashing, designed by the military-industrial complex to give boys a favourable attitude toward the armed forces. Others have suggested that a child’s predilection toward war toys is hard-wired into the brain and develops from a sense of self-preservation where “instinctive animal play is practice for survival: the kitten’s ball of yarn is tomorrow’s mouse.”36 Playing with war toys, in other words, might prepare young children for the struggles they will face as they grow older. Still others have dismissed it simply as a “macho thing.”
Me? As a kid I just really liked running around the forest and getting dirty, and I thought G.I. Joe was the coolest toy around, slightly ahead of Transformers. As I got older and my taste in toys became more sophisticated, I was attracted to video games. Like millions of other kids (and adults), I found them to be a great form of interactive entertainment.
Historically, the toy and games market has provided a much-needed creative, commercial and intellectual outlet for many military inventors and designers. Silly Putty and the Slinky, for example, were products of last-resort thinking, inventions with no practical use that were repurposed into playthings that turned out to be commercial sensations. In Jack Ryan’s case, Mattel provided the promise of fame and fortune as well as the canvas on which he could practise his technical creativity, attractions that building missiles at Raytheon just didn’t offer. William Higinbotham, for his part, was driven to demonstrate that his work could not only destroy the world, but could also enlighten and perhaps even entertain it.
Recognition was also a main motivator for all of these inventors. Because of their military associations, they often had to conceal their work for security reasons. The Slinky and Tennis for Two were highly publicized, unlike the many other projects that Richard James and Higinbotham could not talk about. Scientists and engineers dream about toys and games because they are tangible examples of their work—products they can point to on a store shelf and show to their family or friends. As Ralph Baer says, “If you work at Sanders on a program for five years, it ends up as a box in an F7 fighter and nobody knows what you’re doing because it’s all classified. And even if you can show it off, it’s usually a grey box. Toys and games are an attractive place to be.”
The evolution of these toys has had a profound impact on how war is conducted. In its thirty-plus years of existence, the video-game market has mushroomed into an $18-billion industry; in 2007 it eclipsed the total revenue brought in by the movie business.37 The military, for its part, has steadily stepped up its use of video games in training. In 2010 a new video game unit of the U.S. Army, for example, will have $50 million to spend to watch trends in the industry and identify technology that can be used to train soldiers.38 Video games are also being used in recruitment, enticing potential soldiers with the allure of living out Xbox and Playstation war titles such as Call of Duty or Ghost Recon in real life. In 2009 the Air Force rolled out a sleek new website featuring interactive video games that allowed visitors to re-enact an actual A-10 Thunderbolt mission in Afghanistan, fly a Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle in Iraq or even refuel a plane in mid-air.
The technological development has come full circle— while many toys and games began as offshoots of military technology, they are now influencing and changing that same technology. When soldiers using Foster-Miller bomb-disposal robots complained that the dual-knob control system was too complicated to learn, the company redesigned it to use an Xbox controller. The same went for iRobot’s PackBot, which now uses a PlayStation controller. During a visit to iRobot’s headquarters near Boston, I got to test-drive a PackBot, the company’s own bomb disposer. Having grown up on video games, I had the machine mastered within minutes; I couldn’t believe how easy it was to control.
The military knows its recruits today are video-game junkies, familiar not just with the technology but also with the violent themes, and it exploits this. “The Army will draw on a generation of mind-nimble (not necessarily literate), finger-quick youth and their years of experience as heroes and killers in violent, virtually real interactive videos,” says one military journal.39
Video games are now providing playtime training to future troops, and those future troops don’t even know it. This is dramatically changing new soldiers’ views toward fighting wars, and not necessarily in a good way. The sociologists and psychologists who have argued that violent video games are desensitizing people to real-world violence may just be right, at least when it comes to the actual fighting of wars. As one young air force lieutenant described coordinating unmanned air strikes in Iraq, “It’s like a video game, the ability to kill. It’s like ... freaking cool.”40