https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2021/12/17/transformers-poker-henry-orenstein-dead/

Ingenuity and chance — these were the threads that ran through Henry Orenstein’s story, from his survival in Poland during the Holocaust to his life in the United States, where he reinvented himself as an American entrepreneur.

A tinkerer and toymaker who died Dec. 14 at 98, Mr. Orenstein enlivened the playscape of the United States with the raft of dolls, racecars and other novelties that he helped bring to toy shelves beginning in the 1950s. “The Nazis took away his childhood,” a cover story for Newsweek magazine declared of Mr. Orenstein in 2016, so he “taught the world how to play.”

He was best known for his role in two innovations: Transformers, the wildly popular shape-shifting robot toys that he helped introduce to the U.S. market in the 1980s, and the hole-card camera, a device that sparked the phenomenon of televised poker tournaments in the 2000s by allowing TV audiences to see the cards hidden from competing players’ view.

Mr. Orenstein did not invent Transformers, which became one of the most successful toy franchises of all time, with accompanying comic books, animated TV series and films. But he was credited with recognizing the potential of a tiny morphable car made by the Japanese toy company Takara — the genesis of the Transformers line — which he noticed at a New York toy fair and pitched to Hasbro. It was his ingenuity, Hasbro executives told Newsweek, that enabled him to spot an ingenious idea...................

...Orenstein patented multiple toys in the 1960s, including the Suzy Cute Doll and Johnny Lightning toy cars, his wife explained.......