... continued from above.
Although it was believed for many years that Air Hockey was invented by the Brunswick Billiards employee Bob Lemieux in 1972, the game was actually invented by a trio of Brunswick engineers - Phil Crossman, Bob Kendrick, and Brad Baldwin. So the story goes, these gentlemen were attempting to create a game utilizing a frictionless surface, circa 1969. However, the project never got off the ground and was left untouched for several years, until Lemeiux resurrected the project and adjusted the design a bit. Some say that Lemieux originally played the game for his own entertainment on the table using a round disk, square mallets, and doorbells hooked at each end with a photo sensor to signal a "goal". It was then decided that the game may appeal to a larger market and Air Hockey was born!
How much of this is truth and how much of this is embellished assumptions may never be truly known given Lemieux died in the early 1990s. One fact we can be certain of is that the original patent references Phil Crossman, who, along with the other engineers, pioneered the frictionless table surface and help create the instant classic that we now know and love as Air Hockey.