In August 1966, engineer Ralph H. Baer was waiting for a bus in New York City when an idea he had first pitched in 1951 came rushing back: let television viewers control what happens on the screen. This episode tells how Baer, then head of the equipment design division at defense contractor Sanders Associates, wrote a four-page proposal for Channel LP, commandeered an empty room, and secretly built a prototype with technician Bob Tremblay before R&D director Herbert Campman gave him a $2,500 budget to make it official.

We follow the hardware-only design process, Bill Rusch's breakthrough of adding a third machine-controlled dot that made ping-pong possible, and the seventh prototype, the wood-grain Brown Box, finished in January 1969. Then comes the search for a manufacturer, the 1971 deal with Magnavox, the compromises that removed col ...