http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/busin ... at-87.html
Excerpt:
Norman Sas, Inventor of Electric Football, Dies at 87
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: July 12, 2012
Norman Sas, a toy maker who transformed a vibrating sheet of metal into a thrilling and sometimes exasperating tabletop game called electric football, winning the devotion of boys from the late 1940s until simulated on-field action arrived on video screens in the 1980s, died on June 28 at his home in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 87.
His daughter Wendy Jones confirmed his death.
In the 1930s, an employee at a New York metal products company run by Mr. Sas’s father developed a device that propelled figures across a metal surface using vibrations created by a small motor. The company, Tudor Metal Products, first used the technology for car and horse racing games. But when Norman Sas bought the company with a partner shortly after World War II, he saw potential in applying the technology to football, which had become increasingly popular and was beginning to be televised in the New York region.
“He was looking for something to pick the company up because it was struggling,” said Earl Shores, a writer who interviewed Mr. Sas several times for a book he and a colleague, Roddy Garcia, are writing about electric football, titled “The Unforgettable Buzz.”
Mr. Shores said Mr. Sas may have also been drawn to football because of one of the frustrations of the technology: the vibrations tended to steer figures unpredictably, often into clumps that resembled a pileup at the end of a football play. The unpredictability — and the effort to mitigate it — came to define electric football as much as its tiny felt footballs, which were easily lost between sofa cushions.
