Mike's Genealogy Site
Philip Diamant's Patent
A drawing from a patent obtained by Philip Diamant in 1965 for a board game.
"I actually remember my dad getting the patent for this first version of the game he later named "Space Race". I can tell you exactly how this patent evolved. One evening, when I was about 9 years old, I had taken some bath toys out of the bath before going to sleep. I had a striped bedspread, and that evening, instead of telling me a bedtime story, my dad took the toys...boats and a lighthouse...he put the lighthouse on the top stripe of the bedspread and set the boats on the bottom stripe. He organized a game, each of us moving one boat one stripe up, and if two boats of the same color landed on a stripe at once, the player got and extra move. The first to reach the lighthouse was the winner.
We played the game for about half an hour, with dad refining the rules as we went along. He had that look in his eye, thinking, really concentrating with a sense of purpose and discovery.
The next night we played the game again, and this time he started writing it down and by the following day he had drawn up a schematic game board. By the end of the week, my large, unwieldy plastic boats were replaced by small, styrofoam prototypes he had cut and painted, each with a sail in a different color. Now the options multipled, since either the boat color OR the sail color could match. By the following week he had small plastic boats made, and he then applied for the patent. Once he had the patent, he changed the boats to rocket ships and the board to an artist's rendering of outer space, with a plastic cover with ridges rather than stripes. As Betsy wrote to you, he tried to sell it to Milton Bradley, but they didn't want it, stating that 'Outer Space Games would never sell'. This was in 1966, I think."
Click here to download the full patent, available as Adobe™ PDF files. Although many Web browsers can display these files, in some cases you may need the free Acrobat Reader® supplied by Adobe™.