Ralph Henry Baer (born Rudolf Heinrich Baer; March 8, 1922 – December 6, 2014) was a German-born American inventor, game developer, and engineer.
Baer’s Jewish family left Germany before World War II began. During the war, Baer worked to support the United States, and after the war, he became interested in electronics. He held several jobs in the electronics industry and worked as an engineer at Sanders Associates (now BAE Systems) in Nashua, New Hampshire. Around 1966, he had the idea of playing games on a television screen. With support from his employer, he created several early models, including a device called the "Brown Box." This device became the basis for the first home video game console, which Magnavox later licensed as the Magnavox Odyssey. Baer also designed other consoles and computer game units, including helping to create the Simon electronic game. He continued working in electronics until his death in 2014 and held over 150 patents.
Baer is known as "the Father of Video Games" because of his many contributions to the development of games and his role in starting the video game industry in the second half of the 20th century. In February 2006, he received the National Medal of Technology for "his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development, and commercialization of interactive video games, which led to related uses, applications, and large industries in both the entertainment and education fields."
Early life and education
Baer was born in 1922 to Lotte (Kirschbaum) and Leo Baer, a Jewish family living in Pirmasens, Germany. His original name was Rudolf Heinrich Baer. At age 14, he was removed from his school because of laws that targeted Jewish people in Nazi Germany. He then attended a school that only Jewish students could go to. His father worked in a shoe factory in Pirmasens during this time. Baer's family moved from Germany to New York City in 1938, two months before Kristallnacht, because they were afraid of more harm. This happened when Baer was a teenager. Baer later became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Career
In the United States, Baer learned skills on his own and worked in a factory, earning twelve dollars each week. After seeing an ad at a bus station about learning electronics, he left his job to study the subject. He completed training as a radio service technician at the National Radio Institute in 1940. In 1943, he was called to serve in World War II and worked for military intelligence at the U.S. Army headquarters in London. After returning from the war in 1946, he donated about 16,000 kilograms of weapons he had collected to museums in Aberdeen, Maryland; Springfield, Massachusetts; and Fort Riley, Kansas. Using money from the G.I. Bill to pay for his education, Baer earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Television Engineering from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949. At the time, this degree was uncommon.
In 1949, Baer became chief engineer at a small company called Wappler, Inc., which made medical equipment. There, he designed and built surgical cutting machines, hair-removal devices, and equipment that used low-frequency pulses to tone muscles. In 1951, he worked as a senior engineer at Loral Electronics in Bronx, New York, designing equipment for power lines that IBM used. From 1952 to 1956, he worked at Transitron, Inc., in New York City, first as a chief engineer and later as vice president.
Before joining Sanders Associates, a defense contractor in Nashua, New Hampshire (now part of BAE Systems Inc.), Baer started his own company. He worked at Sanders Associates from 1956 until his retirement in 1987. His main job was managing about 500 engineers who created electronic systems for military use. This work led to the idea of a home video game console. Baer later developed the first commercial video game consoles and held patents for other video game and toy inventions. As he neared retirement, he partnered with Bob Pelovitz of Acsiom, LLC, and they created and sold toy and game ideas from 1983 until Baer’s death.
Baer was a Life Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His son, Mark, helped nominate him to become an IEEE Life Fellow, the highest membership level in the organization.
Personal life
In 1952, Baer married Dena Whinston. She passed away in 2006. During their marriage, they had three children. When Baer died, he had four grandchildren. Baer died at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire on December 6, 2014. Family members and close friends confirmed this information.
Inventions
In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Ralph Baer began thinking about making games that could be played on television screens. He first had the idea in 1951 while working at Loral, another electronics company, but they were not interested in the project at that time. In a 2007 interview, Baer explained that he noticed the cost of owning a television had decreased, which created a chance for new uses of television, such as those explored by military groups. After forming the idea of making a game for television, Baer wrote a four-page proposal to persuade his supervisor to let him begin the project. He received $2,500 and the help of two engineers, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch. Together, they created the "Brown Box" console video game system, named for the brown tape used to wrap the units to look like wood. Baer shared that during a meeting with a patent examiner and his lawyer, he set up a prototype on a television in the examiner’s office. Within 15 minutes, many examiners gathered to play the game. The Brown Box was patented on April 17, 1973, with U.S. Patent No. 3728480, and became jointly owned by Ralph Baer and BAE Systems.
Baer tried to find a company to buy the system but faced little interest from television manufacturers. In 1971, the technology was licensed to Magnavox, which finished the design and released it in September 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey.
After the release of Pong, a game inspired by table tennis on the Odyssey, a long disagreement happened between Baer and Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, about who was the true "father of video games." Baer was willing to let Bushnell take credit, though he noted that Bushnell had repeated "nonsensical stories" for many years. Eventually, the industry named Baer the father of the home video game console and gave Bushnell credit for creating the concept of the arcade machine. After Baer’s death, Bushnell said Baer’s contributions to the rise of video games should not be forgotten.
Baer also helped create three popular electronic games. With Howard J. Morrison, he developed Simon (1978) and its sequel Super Simon (1979) for Milton Bradley, which were pattern-matching games that became very popular through the late 1990s. Simon was patented in 1980 with Pat No. 4,207,087. Baer also made a similar game called Maniac for the Ideal Toy Company (1979) on his own, but it was not as popular as Simon. Baer believed Maniac was "really hard to play," which made it less successful.
In 2006, Baer gave hardware prototypes and documents to the Smithsonian Institution. He continued working on inventions until at least 2013. At the time of his death, Baer had over 150 patents. These included patents for video games, electronic greeting cards, and tracking systems for submarines.
Awards and tributes
Ralph Baer is known as "The Father of Video Games" and was recognized for his important role in creating the video game industry. He received several awards, including the G-Phoria Legend Award in 2005, the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award in 2008, the Game Developers Conference Developers Choice "Pioneer" award in 2008, and the IEEE Edison Medal in 2014. After his death in 2014, he was honored with the Pioneer Award by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences at the 2015 Game Developers Conference.
On February 13, 2006, President George W. Bush presented Baer with the National Medal of Technology for his work in creating, developing, and bringing interactive video games to the public. On April 1, 2010, Baer was added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame during a ceremony at the United States Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. Although some recent advances in video game technology did not always highlight Baer’s contributions, he once said, "Because the President of the United States gave me the National Medal of Technology in 2006 and because I was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, I don’t feel neglected."
In 2006, Baer gave many of his inventions to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. After his death in 2014, his workshop from his home on Mayflower Drive in Manchester was moved to the museum. It is now displayed permanently in the museum’s Innovation Wing.
Legacy
On April 8, 2021, the U.S. Mint announced that Baer and "Handball" would be recognized in the American Innovation dollars program.
On May 10, 2019, a statue was placed to honor Baer in Arms Park in Manchester, New Hampshire. The area around the memorial in the park was renamed Baer Square. One of Baer’s sons and several of his grandchildren attended the ceremony. The memorial was funded through a Kickstarter fundraising campaign.