Henry Orenstein, the artificer who gave the human beings Transformers toys and televised poker, has died, older 98.
Orenstein revolutionized stove poker by fashioning the ‘hole card cam,’ which allowed a video audience to check players’ face-down cards. His invention turned the spunky into viable spectator sport and sparked the poker game manna from heaven of the mid-2000s.
He was himself a fire hook champion, winning a World Series of Poker bracelet in 7-card stud.
With Transformers, he created I of the to the highest degree pop toy lines of the 1980s, which later launched a megahit pic franchise.
Holocaust Survivor
Born in Hrubieszów in southeastern Republic of Poland inwards 1923, Orenstein was a Holocaust subsister whose parents were murdered past the Nazis. He and his brothers were deported to the Majdanek denseness cantonment on the outskirts of Lublin, and and so to the Płaszów refugee camp exterior Krakow, under notorious, sadistic war outlaw Amon Goeth.
Finally, he was transferred to the Ravensbrück cantonment inward Germany, which was liberated past the Red Army inward Apr 1945.
Of the roughly 7,500 Jews that lived inwards Hrubieszów inward 1939, Orenstein and his 2 brothers were among an estimated 140 to hold out the Holocaust.
‘I Shall Survive’
Orenstein attributed his survival, inwards part, to his notification his captors, falsely, that he had trained as a scientist.
Incredibly, this allowed him to enrol inward a delusionary Nazi scheme to bring through the German war travail by using Jewish scientists and engineers to make a gas that would paralyse foe tanks and aircraft.
According to Orenstein’s 1987 book, I Shall Survive, the connive was a sham. It was largely composed of prisoners without these skills who were simply play the war would remnant before the SS found them out.
Orenstein also realized the High German “professors” overseeing it kept it going because it prevented them from being drafted into the ground forces to fight back on the Russian front.
Inventor, Poker Legend
Orenstein arrived inward America inward 1947 with little to his figure and found a job workings at the Libby’s transcribed food for thought factory inwards Upstate New York. One day, he saw a dolly inwards a department store window on cut-rate sale for $29.95.
Convinced he could do toys of similar character at a a great deal cheaper price, he became a fiddle manufacturer, creating popular 1950s dolly “Betty the Beautiful Bride.”
In to a lesser extent than a year, he sold 1.5 billion of these dolls.
He later founded the companies Deluxe Reading and Topper Toys, which produced Johnny Lightning toy cars and Dawn Dolls.
At the time of his death, Orenstein had o'er 100 patents to his name.
Game-Changer
Prior to his invention of the hollow identity card cam, watching poker game was ilk watching pigment dry. Unless a locoweed went to showdown, the audience wouldn’t receive to see any cards the players were holding. This made followers the sue impossible.
In the belatedly 1990s, Orenstein created a unexampled form of table with drinking glass windows at from each one view and a camera underneath that could show the antecedently secret cards.
NBC Sports President of Programming Jon Alton Glenn Miller one time said that Orenstein was “single handedly responsible for the success of poker today.”
He was inducted into the Poker Granville Stanley Hall of Fame inward 2008.