Electric Football: Norman Sas’ Invention Thrilled Kids Before Video Games

July 21, 2012   ·   Greg Eno   ·   Jump to comments

So it really took an MIT grad to come up with electric football?
Not exactly.
But it took an MIT grad to come up with electric horse racing and then decide that there was no money in that, but that there might be in a football version.
Norman Sas was a mechanical engineer, another egghead from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in the U.S. Navy and worked in plastics and turbines for General Electric.
In 1948, he became president of a family-owned company founded by his father. The company was named the Tudor Metal Products Corp.
Sas, with his mechanical engineering degree and his Navy experience and his time with GE, was, above all else, a visionary.
The Tudor company had itself a horse racing game whose pieces moved on a sheet of vibrating metal, powered by good old-fashioned electricity.
In the late 1940s, pro football was entering its golden age. Television, the burgeoning technology of the time, was a big part of the nation&rsqu...

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