A group of Brunswick Billiards employees invented air hockey between 1969 and 1972. Phil Crossman, Bob Kenrick, and Brad Baldwin, three Brunswick engineers, started working on a frictionless surface game in 1969. After several years of stagnation, the concept was revived by Bob Lemieux, who focused on creating an abstracted form of ice hockey with a thin disc, two strikers, and slit-like goals with photodetectors. Air hockey was then marketed and sold to the general public after it was determined that the game might appeal to a bigger market.
It is a tabletop activity in which two opposing players use two hand-held discs ("mallets") and a lightweight plastic puck to score goals against each other on a low-friction table. Air hockey is played on an air table, which is an older technology.
Air tables began as a conveyor system that allowed heavy objects such as cardboard boxes to flow effortlessly across a table surface. Ball bearings were used to seal very large holes in the original air tables from the 1940s. The balls would be depressed by an object on the table, enabling air to escape and lifting the thing slightly off the table. This had been developed and repurposed as a teaching tool for elementary physics by the year 1967.
