Henry Orenstein, the artificer who gave the human beings Transformers toys and televised poker, has died at eld 98.

Orenstein revolutionized fire hook by fashioning the “hole identity card cam,” which allowed a telecasting audience to reckon players’ face-down cards. His innovation turned the game into a viable viewer sport and sparked the poker roaring of the mid-2000s.

He was himself a poker champion, winning a World Series of Poker bangle inwards 7-card stud.

With Transformers, he created single of the to the highest degree popular fiddle lines of the 1980s, which later launched a smash hit flick franchise.

Holocaust Survivor

Orenstein was born inwards Hrubieszów in southeastern Poland in 1923. He was a Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered by the Nazis.

He and his brothers were deported to the Majdanek density camp on the outskirts of Lublin, and so to the Płaszów camp down alfresco Krakow, under notorious sadistic war malefactor Amon Goeth. Finally, he was transferred to the Ravensbrück encamp in Germany, which was liberated past the Red River Army inwards April 1945.

Approximately 7,500 Jews lived inwards Hrubieszów in 1939. Orenstein and his deuce brothers were among an estimated 140 from the townsfolk to endure 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 enroll inwards a delusionary German Nazi connive to save the German language state of war travail past using Judaic scientists and engineers to make a gas that would paralyze foe tanks and aircraft.

According to Orenstein’s 1987 book, I Shall Survive, the connive was a sham. It was mostly 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 sledding because it prevented them from being drafted into the regular army to fight on the Russian front.

Inventor, Poker Legend

Orenstein arrived inward America inward 1947 with little to his make and found a job workings at the Libby’s tinned solid food mill in Upstate New York. One day, he saw a dolly inward a section salt away window on sales event for $29.95.

Convinced he could make toys of similar calibre 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 trillion 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 o'er 100 patents to his name.

Game-Changer

Prior to his innovation of the golf hole card cam, watching poker was the likes of watching pigment dry. Unless a potful went to showdown, the audience wouldn’t catch to reckon any cards the players were holding. This made next the litigate impossible.

In the late 1990s, Orenstein created a unexampled tolerant of tabularize with glaze windows at from each one situation and a camera underneath that could say the antecedently hidden cards.

NBC Sports President of Programming Jon Henry Miller at one time said that Orenstein was “single-handedly responsible for(p) for the success of salamander today.”

He was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame inwards 2008.