Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. ....if wikipedia is correct 
Bingo....it's pretty amazing that most books about the history of video games miss this...
Here's the patent he submitted in 1947 (!). I found it on Jed Margolin's site:
http://www.jmargolin.com/patents/2455992.pdfIt's a very interesting read ! Apart from the extensive description of how it works (which I don't follow, because it's all based on tubes of course) it also explains how it played.
It pretty extensively described the set-up of the screen and the controls, which is funny because it's so obvious now, but new then and also had to be described for the patent.
It introduced "overlays" on the screen (they mention aircraft figures placed on the screen), which of course was later followed by the Odessey and Vectrex systems.
The coolest thing is that they even thought about a "special effect": They defocussed the beam when the "dot" hit the target. I wonder if Jed was inspired by this for the Star Wars explosion which uses the same idea of defocussing !
