CRT Amusement Device
The rapid rise of video games to $61 billion dollar business in 2015 all started nearly five decades ago with Ralph Baer's "Brown Box"—at least, that's the prevailing theory. Almost 20 years before Baer's breakthrough invention, however, and long before anyone ever heard of Pong or Mario, a Greenville, South Carolina engineer submitted a 1947 patent for a revolutionary new entertainment contraption titled the "Cathode-ray tube amusement device." Today, few recognize Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. as the inventor of the first video game system. But they should.
"It never registered that this would have been the first video game."
Salad Days of Cathode Rays
Goldsmith, born in 1910, got his start in electronics when he was only ten years old building an amplifier for his hard-of-hearing grandmother who was using an ear trumpet. (While she preferred the ear trumpet, the amplifier worked.) Through high school and into undergrad at Furman University, Goldsmith became obsessed with electronics, especially crystal radio sets, a new technology that had just become popular. In 1931, he went to Cornell to get his Ph.D. in physics, where he began researching a device that was becoming essential for electronic communications: the cathode-ray tube.
Cathode rays—beams of high-speed electrons leaving a polarized, heated electric device in a vacuum tube—were first observed in 1869 by German physicist Johann Hittrof and named by Eugen Goldstein. While the science wasn't fully understood at the time (the scientists thought they were seeing rays or waves, rather than electrons), this discovery became the basis for a slew of electrical innovations. Karl Ferdinand Braun, who would later win a Nobel Prize for his work with "wireless telegraphy," created the first cathode-ray tube, naming it the Braun Tube after himself.
Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. in 1984.
If you're old enough to remember the days before flat-screen TVs and computer monitors, then you remember how ubiquitous cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) became. A CRT was essentially the picture tube in a television, the component that creates and receives the beams of electrons that show the image. It's made up of three parts: the electron gun, the phosphor-coated screen, and the glass viewing surface. When electrified, the CRT emits a narrow beam of electrons that pass through electrical coils that deflect, intensify and direct the beam at the phosphor-coated screen (in a black-and-white TV, the phosphor is white). When struck by this beam, the phosphor screen produces visible light and creates the traditional tv glow on the glass viewing surface. As time went on, televisions grew in size and so did CRTs, leading to the bulky, heavy sets we remember from the 1980s and 90s. This is one of the reasons why the market moved towards the lightweight LCD and plasma screens in the 2000s.
Russian Boris Rosing was the first person to use a CRT in the transmission of black-and-white images, creating what could be considered the first primitive TV. Several years after that, the nearly simultaneous work of RCA's Vladimir Zworykin (who had worked for Rosing) and Philo Farnsworth led to the using of cathode ray tubes for transmitting recorded images in the first electronic television system. CRTs also led to the first early idea for a video game.
Mullards were the leading UK producers of cathode ray tubes during the 1950s, which were in demand by the growing market for television receivers.
The Godfather of Space Invaders
Back in Ithaca, Goldsmith needed a higher-frequency cathode ray tube for his oscillograph, so he contact a little laboratory in New Jersey run by Allen B. DuMont. Goldsmith got much more than a CRT—DuMont hired him as head of research, and Goldsmith joined a team that would change how the world entertained itself, from television sets to TV networks. In addition to working on the perfection of the CRT and pioneering color television by experimenting with red, blue, green phosphor, Goldsmith was part of the company delegation that brought DuMont's new fishbowl-shaped televisions to the 1939 World's Fair in Queens, New York. As President Franklin Roosevelt delivered his opening remarks, crowds of people huddled around the sets, all of them probably watching television for the first time.
Like many other companies during World War II, DuMont pushed pause on its ordinary business in favor of building wartime technology like radar and missile launching systems. At war's end, DuMont tried to transform its military innovations into commercials successes. This was likely Goldsmith's motivation when he began work on the what he would later call the "cathode-ray tube amusement device."
Thomas Goldsmith\'s patent
Using radar applications, electromagnetic beams, and a CRT, the gameplay—at least what Goldsmith's patent describes—seem like an ancestor to Space Invaders or Galaxian. The player sits in front of the large contraption mounted in a closet and uses a control (later described as knobs) to "manipulate the trace or position of the beam." The point of the game was to hit targets, like pictures of airplanes that would be manually placed on the tube, using the beam. The patent specifically requests the player to make sure the beam's path departed from a straight line "so as to require an increased amount of skill and care." Even in 1947 people understood that every good video game needed explosions, with the patent reading, "the game can be more spectacular... by making a visible explosion of the cathode ray beam take place when the target is hit."
While Goldsmith's game idea was certainly ahead of its time, Alex Magoun, a historian at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, notes that the device was not what we would consider much of a video game today. "There's no computer, no microprocessor generating random airplane paths.They are just sticking targets on the picture tube and then using a couple of electromechanical controls to try to guide an electron beam. In that respect, it is not a fully developed technology by any means."
Magoun speculates that Goldsmith's invention was only a demo and no actual prototype was made. We don't know this for sure, but there are other reasons to belive it beyond the technological. "DuMont was constantly strapped for funds," Magoun says. "[That was] the whole story of that company from the 30s into the 60s." Sure enough, in 1960 Allen B. DuMont sold his remaining shares to Fairchild Camera, marking the end of DuMont Labs' short but influential run.
In the years following, Goldsmith's patent was more or less forgotten. Even when Spacewar!—probably the first actual video game— was developed at MIT in 1961, the designers led by Steven Russell were so focused on what came next, they hardly had time to look back.
"They may have found (the patent) after the fact, but it had no influence on their actual work," says Chris Garcia, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. After Spacewar! and the computing advancements of the 1960s, the revolution was on. There was Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space, the first mass-produced, commercially-sold arcade game. In 1972, Magnavox Odyssey is released to the public, licensed and based on Baer's "Brown Box" design. Next, came Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Gameboy, Playstation, Xbox, Wii, and the mysterious soon-to-be-released Nintendo NX—all developed, designed and produced with little knowledge of Goldsmith's beam and dot game.
"He said if you turn these knobs and dials, you could make a little beam move across the image."
Dials and Knobs
After working at DuMont, Goldsmith returned to his alumni mater to become a professor of physics. But he brought part of his previous career with him to Furman. Bill Brantley joined the faculty in 1966 as a professor of physics. He tells Popular Mechanics he remembers Goldsmith demonstrating for him the cathode-ray tube amusement device.
"It never registered that this would have been the first video game," Brantley says. "He said if you turn these knobs and dials, you could make a little beam move across the image orthicon... and then by turning these other dials and knobs, you can change the electric field and magnetic field... and if you had the skills enough, you could hit the various little targets. If you think about the fact that you're controlling it like a joystick, in a way it was a pretty advanced game. "
Goldsmith died in 2009 at the age of 99, his impact on the future little appreciated. Sure, it may be hard for the gamers of today to appreciate a little beam moving across a screen, but don't tell that to Magoun.
"People may now look down at this technology from almost 75 years ago," he says, but just imagine your great-grandchildren looking at the games you grew up with and being utterly unimpressed. "Who can possibly imagine what games we're going to have in three generations?"
Matt Blitz
Matt is a history, science, and travel writer who is always searching for the mysterious and hidden. He's written for Smithsonian Magazine, Washingtonian, Atlas Obscura, and Arlington Magazine. He calls Washington D.C. home and probably tells way too many cat jokes.
