The Pump Handle

1967 · Television Game Prototype · Work 1158 of 1,871

A small laboratory in low June sun, a large colour television in a plain walnut cabinet, two small bright white squares of light on its dark screen, before it on a steel bench a long open aluminium chassis with green circuit boards, a wooden pump handle on a steel rod at one end, beside the set the man, a slim man of forty-five, receding dark hair, dark horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, narrow dark tie, one hand on the pump handle, his face in three-quarter view toward the screen, two men in dark suits in the foreground, backs fully to the camera, heads turned fully away.

Who
Ralph H. Baer (1922–2014) was a television engineer and inventor who brought games to the ordinary living-room television set. Born on 8 March 1922 into a Jewish family in Pirmasens, Germany, he fled the Nazis with his parents in 1938; the family settled in the Bronx, New York. He trained as a radio technician, served in US Army military intelligence during the Second World War and afterwards earned a degree in television engineering at the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago. From 1956 he worked at Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire, a maker of airborne radar components, rising to chief engineer for equipment design. There, in 1966, he began developing games for home television sets on the side, with William H. Harrison and William T. Rusch. Seven experimental units led to the Magnavox Odyssey of 1972, the first commercial home video game console; by 1975 Magnavox had sold more than 700,000 of them. The game Simon also grew out of his work, and he held more than 150 patents. In 2006 President George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of Technology, and in 2010 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He died on 6 December 2014.
The moment
On 15 June 1967 Baer showed senior management what had been built in a small lab next to the elevator. The day before, corporate director Herbert Campman had played all the games; he and patent counsel Louis Etlinger signed a statement that they had played them. Now president Royden Sanders, executive vice president Harold Pope and the board of directors, meeting at the plant that day, came up. The team demonstrated TV Game Unit #2, a large aluminium chassis with a wooden pump handle, connected to a 17-inch RCA colour television. The programme included a chase between two squares of light, Fox and Hounds, a bucket-filling game and target shooting with a light gun. Baer had recorded the introductions on tape, and they played through the set's loudspeaker. The unit worked like a charm; some doubted it could become a business, yet management let the work go on: "Build something we can sell or license, and soon!" Everything was built from individual transistors, because in 1967 integrated circuits were still too expensive and used too much power. The picture shows Baer at the pump handle, the two squares of light on the screen.
The other side
The first game for the living-room television was born in a defence firm. Sanders then worked exclusively on defence electronics, and the project's first 2,500 dollars came from the company's research and development money. Afterwards the invention often ended up in court: Magnavox became the first licensee in 1971, Atari only in 1976, after the first of many patent lawsuits won by Sanders. And Magnavox's early advertising left many buyers believing that the Odyssey could only be played on Magnavox television sets.

What the sources leave open: The course of the day is known from Baer's own account; the Smithsonian papers support the date only through dated folders. Sources disagree on whether the lab was on the fifth or the sixth floor. Light, furniture, clothing and the number of onlookers in the picture are typified. The face follows a public-domain photograph of Baer from 1977.

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Sources