Brookhaven National Laboratory

New York

One of the world's first video games was built at a nuclear physics lab on Long Island in 1958.

engineeringhistorical

In 1958, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory built one of the world's first video games. They called it Tennis for Two. This was a place designed for atomic research, five thousand acres of reactors and particle accelerators, and someone wired up a game of tennis on a lab instrument. Nine years later the same lab patented Maglev, the magnetic levitation technology used to float trains above their tracks. Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work done here. Three of them came out of a single machine, the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, which was used in the discovery of the muon neutrino and the charm quark. The campus has its own fire department, its own armed protective force, and its own ZIP code. About twenty seven hundred people work there, and four thousand more visit each year as guest researchers. In 2024, scientists at Brookhaven discovered a new kind of antimatter nucleus.

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In 1958, Brookhaven scientists created one of the world's first video games, Tennis for Two.

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