Late great engineers: Atom bomb pioneer and games designer William Higinbotham

According to the Federation of American Scientists, early in the 21^st century the retired educationalist Julie Schletter was writing a book about her father. While there is no record of the late Schletter’s manuscript being published, its prolix working title is extraordinary in that it contains three plot spoilers and a terrible pun. A point in its favour is that the reader would have been left in no about the author’s intentions. It was called simply: Accordion to Willy: A Personal History of William Higinbotham the Man who Helped Build the Atom Bomb, Launched the Federation of American Scientists and Invented the First Video Game.

If the extracts from the unpublished letters that were slated for inclusion are indicative of the quality of Schletter’s research, her biography would have been of huge value to historians of technology and the Second World War. Light is cast on the whimsical musical wordplay in Higinbotham’s memoirs, in which he describes his arrival at Washington DC in late 1945: “Then came Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender. We had a big party the night the surrender was announced. I sat on the hood of a jeep, playing my accordion, as we paraded around town. Immediately after that, the discussions began in earnest.” These discussions would lead to the global understanding of the word non-proliferation.