William higinbotham autobiography

The American physicist and a leader in the nonproliferation movement William (Willy) Alfred Higinbotham (1910—1994) is credited with creating the first computer video game to display motion and allow interactive control with hand-held controllers in the middle of 1958.

William Higinbotham earned an undergraduate degree from Williams College in 1932 and continued his studies at Cornell University.

During WW2 he went to work on the radar system at MIT. In the later years of the war, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory (where the first atomic bomb was developed) and headed the lab’s electronics group.

In 1947 Higinbotham entered the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York as a senior physicist and later as head of the Instrumentation Division.

When in October 1958, the Lab organized its annual Visitors Days, Higinbotham realized how static and non-interactive most science exhibits were at tha