Ralph Baer
| Ralph H. Baer | |
|---|---|
Ralph Baer working on a Brown Box reproduction in 2012
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| Born |
Rudolf Heinrich Baer March 8, 1922 Rodalben, Palatinate, Germany |
| Died | December 6, 2014 (aged 92) Manchester, New Hampshire, U.S. |
| Occupation | Inventor, engineer |
| Spouse(s) | Dena Whinston (1952–2006; her death) |
| Children | James, Mark, Nancy |
| Website | www |
Ralph Henry Baer (born Rudolf Heinrich Baer; March 8, 1922 – December 6, 2014) was a German-born American inventor, and engineer, and was known as "The Father of Video Games" due to his many contributions to games and the video game industry in the latter half of the 20th century.
Born in Germany, he and his family fled to the United States before the outbreak of World War II, where he changed his name and later served the American war effort. Afterwards, he pursued work in electronics. In 1951, while working at Loral, he was asked to build "the best television set in the world". He proposed the idea of playing games on television screens, but his boss rejected it. Later in 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, his 1951 idea came back to his mind, and he would go on to develop eight hardware prototypes. The last two (the Brown Box and its de/dt extension) would become the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. He would contribute to the development of other consoles and consumer game units. In February, 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology for "his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games, which spawned related uses, applications, and mega-industries in both the entertainment and education realms".
Baer was born in 1922 to Lotte (Kirschbaum) and Leo Baer, a Jewish family living in Germany, and was originally named Rudolf Heinrich Baer. At age 14, he was expelled from school because of his ancestry and had to go to an all-Jewish school. His father worked in a shoe factory in Pirmasens at the time. Baer's family, fearing increasing persecution, moved from Germany to New York City in 1938 two months prior to Kristallnacht while Baer was a teenager. Baer would later become a naturalized United States citizen.
In the United States, he was self-taught and worked in a factory for a weekly wage of twelve dollars; upon seeing an advertisement at a bus station for education in the budding electronics field, he quit his job to study in the field. He graduated from the National Radio Institute as a radio service technician in 1940. In 1943 he was drafted to fight in World War II and assigned to military intelligence at the United States Army headquarters in London. With his secondary education funded by the G.I. Bill, Baer graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Television Engineering (unique at the time) from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949.
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