Sex, Bombs and Burgers (15 page)

Ryan divorced his first wife, ironically named Barbara, and married actress Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1976. The two never moved in together, however, and Gabor soon discovered Ryan’s wild side. While the couple was honeymooning in Japan, Ryan paid their guide to have sex with Gabor while he held business meetings with a toy manufacturer, much to his wife’s shock and displeasure. “Jack, my new husband (it now appeared) was a fullblown seventies-style swinger into wife-swapping and sundry sexual pursuits as a way of life,” Gabor recalled in her biography. It took seven months for Gabor to tire of the fact that both Ryan’s
ex-wife Barbara and two mistresses were living in his mansion. The couple ended their marriage as abruptly as it had begun. “Jack’s sex life would have made the average
Penthouse
reader blanch with shock,” Gabor said. “I wanted no part whatsoever in any of it.”
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Ryan’s intersection with the Lilli doll was the perfect circumstance, a twist of fate that provided him with the fortune he needed to indulge his wild desires. Just as he was leaving for Tokyo in July 1957 to find a manufacturer for some mechanical toys he had designed, Ruth Handler passed him her Lilli doll. “See if you can get this copied,” she said.
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Ryan landed a deal with Kokusai Boeki Kaisha to manufacture the doll, then set about redesigning Lilli so she would look less like a “German streetwalker.”
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Ryan’s modifications were both technical and cosmetic. Aside from convincing KBK to use a new rotationmoulding process to create a softer doll, he also designed and patented new arm and leg joints that gave Mattel’s toy greater flexibility. The expertise he had gained in building miniaturized moving parts for Raytheon’s missile projects came in handy when designing the doll’s joints, which would have to stand up to the rigours of constant play. The levels of stress that adolescent girls could place on their toys weren’t unlike the forces of gravity, velocity and drag that missiles had to deal with.

Ryan also did away with Lilli’s pouty lips, heavy eyelashes, widow’s peak hairdo and built-in heels. The newly redesigned doll, named Barbie in honour of the Handlers’ daughter, was introduced to the American Toy Fair in New York in March 1959. Backed by a major marketing campaign, Barbie-mania exploded. Girls loved the doll’s wide assortment of accessories and wardrobe and the poseability offered by Ryan’s joint
designs. Mattel sold more than 350,000 dolls in the first year of production, a number that mushroomed over the next four decades to more than one billion sold across 150 countries. The Handlers cashed in and took Mattel public in 1960, making it the world’s biggest toy maker and a member of the exclusive Fortune 500 club. By the late-2000s, the company proudly boasted that three Barbie dolls were sold every second.
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Ryan wasn’t finished, however. While Barbie was starting her meteoric rise, he put his transistor expertise to use by creating a talking version of the doll. Again, only an engineer schooled in the miniaturization of weapons design could have pulled it off. The result was Chatty Cathy, a doll that spoke eleven phrases—such as “Tell me a story” and “I love you”—when you pulled a drawstring on her back. The doll, which went on sale in 1960, had to be larger than Barbie because of the miniature phonograph record player secured in its abdomen. The record was driven by a metal coil that was wound when the drawstring was pulled. Chatty Cathy proved popular too and was soon second only to Barbie in sales. The drawstring-activated voice function revolutionized the entire toy market when Mattel incorporated it into later products, including its Bugs Bunny series and the See ‘n Say educational line.

The former Raytheon engineer also had a hand in creating Hot Wheels, Mattel’s second-most successful toy line overall. In the early sixties, Ryan’s design team was searching for a way to duplicate Barbie’s success with boys. Elliot Handler found the solution when he discovered one of his grandchildren playing with a Matchbox die-cast toy car made by Britain’s Lesney Products. Handler decided Mattel needed to get into the car business and hired Harry Bentley Bradley, a designer who
worked for Cadillac, to help Ryan create a line of toy vehicles. Handler loved Bradley’s own real-world car, a customized Chevy El Camino with red striped tires, mag wheels and fuel injector stacks protruding from the hood. He told his new designer to use his own “hot wheels” as the basis of the toy line. Handler’s plan had one big problem—Lesney’s Matchbox line already had a commanding share of the market. Mattel’s marketing department warned him that if he wanted to compete, he would need to differentiate his product somehow. Ryan, Bradley and the rest of the design team came to the rescue.

They found that kids liked to race their cars, but the Lesney cars and their rivals didn’t roll very well. Ryan’s team designed a bent-axle torsion bar suspension system, which was essentially a miniaturized version of the one used in real cars, with inner wheel ball bearings made of a plastic called Delrin, synthesized by DuPont in 1952. The outer tires were made of nylon and moulded into a slightly conical shape, which reduced friction by limiting the wheels to a single point of surface contact. The resulting toy cars had a little bounce to them, much like real vehicles, and rolled very fast.

The team also perfected “Spectraflame,” a new method of painting that coated the cars with a gleaming silver layer of zinc, then covered them with a thin layer of candy-coloured hues to reflect the “California custom” look Handler wanted. Mattel’s cars were not only faster than their Matchbox counterparts, their snazzy paint jobs stood in stark contrast to the drab enamel shades of their rivals. It was like comparing Ferraris to Edsels.

Even before Hot Wheels made their debut at the New York Toy Fair in 1968, they were a huge hit. Mattel estimated an initial production run of ten to fifteen million cars, but when the toys
were showcased to Kmart shortly before the fair, the retail chain immediately ordered fifty million.
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Hot Wheels joined Barbie and Chatty Cathy as the lynchpins of Mattel’s toy empire.

In the sixties, Ryan tried unsuccessfully to poach some old cohorts from Raytheon to join his design team. Raytheon archivist Norman Krim remembers visiting Ryan in California to entertain one of his job offers. He was struck not so much by the discussion of possible employment, but by some of the engineer’s talking doll prototypes. “He had a bunch of Barbie dolls with tape recorders [in them] that were all saying very nasty four-letter words,” Krim says. “He was a crazy guy.”
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Atomic Tennis

Mattel’s products were a step toward more complex toys, but they were nothing compared to what came after. I visited the site of the next big development on a chilly evening in September 2008. My arrival at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of the world’s best-regarded science and technology hubs, did not go as I expected. While ostensibly “in New York,” the lab is actually far out on the eastern end of Long Island, a two-hour train ride from downtown Manhattan. From the train stop, it’s a further $25 cab ride—there is no other public transportation servicing the lab. When I got to the front gate at 10 P.M., it turned out there had been a mix-up over which day I was supposed to arrive. Apparently I was early, officially by two hours, and the stern security guard refused to let me in. I had little choice but to sit shivering on a bench off to the side of a small clearing in the forest and wait for midnight to arrive. Luckily a family of deer popped into the clearing for a late-night snack of grass, which provided me some small measure of entertainment. One
thought kept echoing through my head: “I can’t believe this is where video games were invented.”

Brookhaven was established on the site of Camp Upton, a wartime army base, by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947 to continue the nuclear research begun by the Manhattan Project. The base was chosen because of its remote location, which was perfect for the nature of the volatile—and potentially destructive—research that would go on there. My visit coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Tennis for Two, an invention many computer historians consider to be the first real video game. The lab’s public relations department was planning a big media event where a reconstructed version of the game would be shown off side by side with the latest Nintendo Wii tennis game, a juxtaposition to show just how far the technology has come in fifty years.

While Peter Hodgson, Richard James and Jack Ryan all looked to profit from inventions or knowledge developed from military origins, William Higinbotham had a distinctly different outlook in creating Tennis for Two. Higinbotham was a graduate student in physics at Cornell University when the Second World War broke out. Karl Compton, president of MIT and a key member of Vannevar Bush’s newly minted National Defense Research Council, wasted no time in recruiting the promising young physicist to his Radiation Lab, where research was under way on what would become radar. While at MIT, Higinbotham likely crossed paths with Percy Spencer and his Raytheon team, who eventually took over mass production of radar.

With most of the pressing research work on the detection system done by the middle of the war, Higinbotham was
recruited by J. Robert Oppenheimer to head up the electronics division of the Manhattan Project, where he created the timing circuits for the atomic bomb. Higinbotham witnessed the test firing of the first bomb in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico, in a shelter thirty-eight kilometres from ground zero. Like many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, he was deeply troubled by the fruits of his labour. After the first test blast, Higinbotham and the other observers got into their transport trucks and rode back to the Los Alamos base in complete silence. No one had anything to say.
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However, fellow physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, a specialist in mass spectrometers, was considerably more vocal than his colleagues later on. The blast was a “foul and awesome display,” he told Oppenheimer, and “now we are all sons of bitches.”
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Even before the bombs were dropped on Japan, scientists at several American research facilities were organizing into protest groups to speak out against the actual use of the weapons. Independent associations formed at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago, the Clinton Laboratory at Oak Ridge, the Substitute Alloy Materials Lab at Columbia University and, under Higinbotham’s leadership, at Los Alamos. When the war ended and the scattered researchers and engineers were finally allowed to communicate with each other, they banded together to form the Federation of Atomic Scientists, a lobby group that sought to limit proliferation of nuclear weapons. Higinbotham was named the first chairman and later its executive director. One of his first actions was the expansion of membership beyond just those who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which necessitated a name change, to the Federation of American Scientists. In a
New York Times Magazine
editorial, Higinbotham
declared the reality of the bomb and outlined what the world had to do to avoid annihilation:

The longer we [scientists] lived with this problem the more alarmed we became.... The first thing we must understand about these forces is that against them there is no defense except world law. There will be no defense in the future, not until man is perfect. We must seek world control of atomic energy because it offers humanity its only measure of safety.
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Higinbotham served as the head of the FAS for two years before stepping down into an executive secretary role, but he continued as a tireless campaigner against nuclear proliferation until his death in 1994. It was only in the eighties, when Cold War tension between the United States and the USSR—and the threat of nuclear destruction—reached its zenith, that he felt his warnings were being taken seriously. “It’s taken over thirty years, but the message is finally beginning to get through,” he said.
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If he were alive today, Higinbotham would probably be disappointed to learn that he is better remembered for his contribution to video games than to nuclear non-proliferation. When the war ended, he went to work at Brookhaven as the head of the instrumentation team, which was responsible for building displays and measurement devices for the facility’s research divisions. The lab, with its idyllic forest setting and mission to better control nuclear power, was the perfect home for the pacifist scientist. Over the next decade, Higinbotham and his team built all manner of electronic tools, from radiation detectors and a device that could measure a rat’s heart rate to computer monitors that tracked the trajectories of missiles.

Residents of Long Island and New York, however, were uneasy about Brookhaven and the work that was going on there. Atomic research was a completely new science that had been shown to produce devastating results, and many people believed one slight mishap could obliterate the entire region in a mushroom cloud. In 1950 the facility tried to dispel those fears by holding annual public open houses to show that its research was in fact safe. The problem, however, was that much of the lab’s work was top secret, so visitors were restricted to viewing photographs and inert equipment, which Higinbotham felt were boring.

Higinbotham was a fun-loving character, a chain-smoker who loved to liven up the lab’s frequent parties with his frenetic accordion playing.
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Many of the staffers at Brookhaven were out-of-towners who only socialized during weekend beach parties. Higinbotham went out of his way to keep their spirits up. He was also a self-confessed pinball junkie, which explains why he came up with Tennis for Two.

Although digital computers were starting to gain traction in the fifties, Higinbotham designed his game on an older analogue machine, which used on-off pulses to represent data. His box, about as big as a current-day microwave oven, was full of vacuum tubes and was programmed to simulate a game of tennis as seen from a side view, complete with varying ball trajectories and speeds. The computer was hooked up to an oscilloscope, a round screen twelve centimetres in diameter that was normally used to display voltages. A green horizontal line represented the court, while a shorter vertical line in the middle was the net. Two small controller boxes were also hooked up to the computer; each had a dial that allowed the holder to direct the angle of the ball and
a button that hit the ball when pressed. The entire design took Higinbotham three weeks to create. The result was effectively the first video game.