William Higinbotham

Born on this day in 1910 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Manhattan Project physicist William Higinbotham was a leader of the nuclear nonproliferation movement. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Williams College in 1932 and joined a group at MIT studying radar devices in 1941. By 1943 Higinbotham was at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico developing electronics for atomic bombs as part of the Manhattan Project. After witnessing the Trinity test up close and the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from afar, Higinbotham became dedicated to limiting the production and spread of nuclear weapons. He was instrumental in transforming the Federation of Atomic Scientists, whose membership was made up of Manhattan Project scientists, into the Federation of American Scientists, whose membership was open to all scientists. For the rest of his career, Higinbotham worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, designing protective devices for scientific and medical instruments and establishing a nuclear safeguards division. Higinbotham is also known for a project that took him only a few weeks in 1958: the creation of Tennis for Two, one of the first video games. (Photo credit: Heka Davis, AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 25 October 1910