Ralph Baer

Ralph Baer was born in 1922 in Pirmasens in south-west Germany. When he was eleven the Nazi race laws had him expelled from school, and in 1938, two months before Kristallnacht, the family got out to New York. He worked in a leather factory and studied radio repair by correspondence course. During the war he served in US Army intelligence, and afterwards took one of the first degrees in television engineering.

By 1966 he was a chief engineer at Sanders Associates, a military contractor in New Hampshire. Waiting at a bus station he wrote a few pages of notes on the idea of playing games on an ordinary television. Nobody had done it, and he had no business doing it, but he found an empty room, a technician and a small budget. With Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch he built a series of prototypes ending in the Brown Box of 1968, which played ping-pong, chase games and a light-gun game.

Licensing it took years. Television manufacturers were baffled. Magnavox finally released it in 1972 as the Odyssey, the first home video game console, and Atari\'s Pong followed the ping-pong game closely enough that Sanders won a string of lawsuits.

Baer went on to co-invent the electronic game Simon in 1978. He kept inventing in his basement workshop into his nineties, and received the National Medal of Technology in 2006. He died in 2014.