Henry Orenstein, the discoverer who gave the human beings Transformers toys and televised poker, has died at eld 98.
Orenstein revolutionized stove poker past devising the “hole card cam,” which allowed a television audience to assure players’ face-down cards. His excogitation turned the spunky into a viable witness sport and sparked the poker game flourish of the mid-2000s.
He was himself a salamander champion, winning a World Series of Poker bracelet in 7-card stud.
With Transformers, he created 1 of the to the highest degree popular toy lines of the 1980s, which later launched a blockbuster picture show franchise.
Holocaust Survivor
Orenstein was born inwards Hrubieszów inwards southeastern Poland inwards 1923. He was a final solution survivor whose parents were murdered by the Nazis.
He and his brothers were deported to the Majdanek immersion refugee camp on the outskirts of Lublin, and and then to the Płaszów camp out outdoors Krakow, under notorious sadistic warfare felon Amon Goeth. Finally, he was transferred to the Ravensbrück tent inwards Germany, which was liberated past the Red River Army in Apr 1945.
Approximately 7,500 Jews lived inwards Hrubieszów inward 1939. Orenstein and his two brothers were among an estimated 140 from the townsfolk to pull round the Holocaust.
‘I Shall Survive’
Orenstein attributed his survival, inwards part, to apprisal his captors, falsely, that he had trained as a scientist.
Incredibly, this allowed him to enrol in a delusionary Nazi scheme to pull through the German language state of war travail past using Judaic scientists and engineers to create a gas that would paralyze enemy tanks and aircraft.
According to Orenstein’s 1987 book, I Shall Survive, the intrigue was a sham. It was largely composed of prisoners without these skills who were simply gambling the state of war would terminal before the SS found them out.
Orenstein also realized the German “professors” overseeing it kept it going because it prevented them from being drafted into the regular army to fight down on the Russian front.
Inventor, Poker Legend
Orenstein arrived in America inwards 1947 with little to his epithet and found a chore working at the Libby’s tinned nutrient manufactory inward Upstate New York. One day, he saw a dolly inward a section fund window on sales event for $29.95.
Convinced he could pee toys of similar character at a practically cheaper price, he became a fiddle manufacturer, creating popular 1950s dolly “Betty the Beautiful Bride.”
In less than a year, he sold 1.5 1000000 of these dolls.
He later founded the companies Deluxe Reading and Topper Toys, which produced Johnny Lightning play cars and Dawn Dolls.
At the clip of his death, Orenstein had over 100 patents to his name.
Game-Changer
Prior to his conception of the hole scorecard cam, watching poker was same watching pigment dry. Unless a bay window went to showdown, the audience wouldn’t have to regard any cards the players were holding. This made next the sue impossible.
In the tardily 1990s, Orenstein created a young genial of table with glass in windows at each office and a camera underneath that could show the antecedently hidden cards.
NBC Sports President of Programming Jon Henry Miller erstwhile said that Orenstein was “single-handedly responsible for the success of poker today.”
He was inducted into the Poker G. Stanley Hall of Fame inward 2008.