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. He helped the United States during the war and became interested in electronics afterward. He worked in the electronics industry and was 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 help from his employer, he created several prototypes until he designed a device called the "Brown Box." This device became the plan for the first home video game console, which Magnavox later named 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 called "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 many other uses and large industries in both the entertainment and education fields."
Early life and education
Rudolf Heinrich Baer was born in 1922 in Pirmasens, Germany, to Lotte (Kirschbaum) and Leo Baer, a Jewish family. He was originally named Rudolf Heinrich Baer. At age 14, he was sent away from school because of laws against Jewish people in Nazi Germany and had to attend a school only for Jewish students. His father worked in a shoe factory in Pirmasens at that time. Baer's family moved from Germany to New York City in 1938, two months before Kristallnacht, while Baer was a teenager. Later in life, Baer became a citizen of the United States.
Career
In the United States, Baer taught himself and worked in a factory, earning twelve dollars each week. After seeing an advertisement at a bus station about education in the growing electronics field, he left his job to study in that area. He completed his training as a radio repair technician from the National Radio Institute in 1940. In 1943, he was required to serve in World War II and was placed in military intelligence at the United States Army headquarters in London. After returning from the war in 1946, he gave a large collection of weapons (about 18 short tons, or 16,000 kilograms) to museums in Aberdeen, Maryland; Springfield, Massachusetts; and Fort Riley, Kansas. With financial support from the G.I. Bill, Baer earned a Bachelor of Science degree in television engineering, a field that was uncommon at the time, from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949.
In 1949, Baer became the chief engineer for a small company named Wappler, Inc., which made electro-medical equipment. There, he created surgical cutting machines, epilators, and devices that used low-frequency pulses to tone muscles. In 1951, he worked as a senior engineer for Loral Electronics in Bronx, New York, designing equipment that sent signals through power lines for IBM. From 1952 to 1956, he was employed at Transitron, Inc., in New York City as a chief engineer and later as vice president.
Before joining a defense contractor named Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire (now part of BAE Systems Inc.) in 1956, Baer started his own company. He remained at Sanders until he retired in 1987. At Sanders, his main job was managing about 500 engineers who developed electronic systems for military use. From this work, the idea for a home video game console was created. Baer later designed the first commercial video game consoles and invented several other patented advances in video games and electronic toys. As he neared retirement, he partnered with Bob Pelovitz of Acsiom, LLC, and they developed 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 lead the process to honor Baer with the title of IEEE Life Fellow, which is the highest membership level in the organization.
Personal life
Baer married Dena Whinston in 1952. She passed away in 2006. During their marriage, they had three children. When Baer died, he had four grandchildren. Family and friends said he passed away at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire on December 6, 2014.
Inventions
In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Ralph Baer began thinking about the idea of playing games on television screens. He first thought about this idea while working at Loral in 1951, but the company was 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 new market for other uses of television, as military groups had already found ways to use television for their needs. After forming the idea of creating a game using a television screen, he wrote a four-page proposal that convinced one of his supervisors to let him begin the project. He received US$2,500 and the help of two other engineers, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch. Together, they developed the "Brown Box" console video game system, named for the brown tape they used to wrap the units, which made them look like wood. Baer shared that during an early 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 in the building came to see and 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 looked for companies interested in buying the system but found little interest from many television manufacturers. In 1971, the technology was licensed to Magnavox, which completed 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 that title but noted that Bushnell "has been telling the same nonsensical stories for 40 years." In the end, the industry recognized Baer as the father of the home video game console, while giving 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 is also credited with helping 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 given Patent No. 4,207,087 in 1980. Baer also created a similar game called "Maniac" for the Ideal Toy Company in 1979, but it was not as popular as Simon. Baer believed Maniac was "really hard to play," which made it less popular than his earlier game.
In 2006, Baer donated hardware prototypes and documents to the Smithsonian Institution. He continued working on projects until at least 2013. At the time of his death, Baer had over 150 patents in his name. In addition to video game-related patents, he also held patents for electronic greeting cards and tracking systems used in submarines.
Awards and tributes
Ralph Baer, known as "The Father of Video Games," was honored for his early work in 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, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences gave him the Pioneer Award at the 2015 Game Developers Conference.
On February 13, 2006, President George W. Bush presented Baer with the National Medal of Technology for his role 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 video game advances did not highlight his work, Baer said he did not feel ignored because he had received the National Medal of Technology and was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
In 2006, Baer gave many of his inventions to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. After his death in 2014, his workshop was moved from the basement of his home on Mayflower Drive in Manchester to the museum. It is now displayed permanently in the museum’s Innovation Wing.
Legacy
On April 8, 2021, the United States Mint said that Baer and "Handball" would be recognized as part of the American Innovation dollar coins program.
On May 10, 2019, a statue was built to honor Baer in Arms Park in Manchester, New Hampshire. The area around the statue in the park was renamed Baer Square. One of Baer’s sons and several of his grandchildren were present at the unveiling ceremony. The memorial was paid for using a Kickstarter fundraising campaign.