As one commentator has cogently noted, “It is perhaps fitting that the father of the video game, that quintessential American invention, was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, whose personal story converged with America’s at a critical time in the nation’s history.”
Ralph Henry Baer (1922-2014) was a German-American inventor, game developer, and engineer who is best known as “the Father of Video Games” due to his many contributions to such games and helping to launch the video game industry. Over the course of his life, his inventions and over 150 U.S. and international patents have contributed to the advancement of military defense, including tracking systems for submarines, and to television technology, video gaming, electronic toys, and other electronic consumer products. He forever changed the way humans interacted with machines for purposes of interactive play not only through his own games and devices, but also through his incredibly prescient vision of the main evolutionary lines of future video game development.
On February 13, 2006 – three days after the death of his beloved wife, Dena – Baer was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President George W. Bush for “his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games (which were originally called “TV games”), which spawned related uses, applications, and mega-industries in both the entertainment and education realms” and he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the United States Department of Commerce. Sadly, his founding contributions have been generally forgotten in the wake of the almost inconceivable advances in contemporary video game technology and development.
Born in Germany to parents Lotte (nee Kirschbaum) and Leo, Baer was raised in the Jewish tradition. He continued to strongly identify as a Jew throughout his life and, after moving to Manchester, New Hampshire, he and Dena, whom he married in 1952, raised their three children and educated them as Jews. Dena was a longtime kindergarten teacher at the Jewish Community Center there; the family were active members of Temple Israel in Manchester, where the children celebrated their bar and bat mitzvahs; and they later joined Temple Adath Yeshurun.
In the Germany of his youth, Baer’s father ran a leather tannery business and supplied leather to the town’s major shoe factories. After being expelled from school at age 14 pursuant to Nazi anti-Jewish laws, Baer’s friends disowned him – including his best friend, who joined the Hitler Youth movement – and he became subject to frequent bullying by his former friends and neighbors. According to his son and many authorities, he turned inward when all his social relationships fell apart, and his later inspiration for video games was, at least in part, finding a way to bring people – especially children – together.
Baer attended a Jewish school and, after his father’s successful business was destroyed by the Nazis and their minions, he began working in a small office to help support his family, where he quickly learned typing, filing, and bookkeeping, and collecting money from nasty and sometimes dangerous recalcitrant bar patrons. He then worked a menial job in a shoe factory, where he manifested an early sign of his future path as a great innovator when he invented a machine that automated what had been a slow manual process.
The situation turned increasingly dire when Leo was forced out of his tannery business for being a Jew – even though he was a veteran who, while serving with Germany during World War I, had earned medals and been wounded twice, once on the Western Front and once on the Eastern Front. When the family was barred from attending its synagogue, they saw the handwriting on the wall and fled Germany to the Netherlands in 1938 – only two months before Kristallnacht. (All of Baer’s paternal uncles and cousins were murdered at Buchenwald and Treblinka.)
In obtaining permission to obtain exit visas for the United States during a time of an ever-shrinking American quota for German Jewish refugees – the family was among the only 27,370 immigrants from Germany who were permitted to enter the United States in 1938 – the family had two important advantages. First, the young Baer had taught himself a virtually accent-free English, which deeply impressed the immigration authorities and enabled them to more easily obtain visas from the consulate. Second, the family was fortunate indeed that their maternal relatives in the United States provided the necessary affidavits and promises of support for their immigration.
After sailing from Rotterdam to New York City, where the family settled in the Bronx, Baer changed his name from Rudolph Heinrich to Ralph Henry to avoid the disgrace of being associated with Nazi Germany and, within a week after his arrival in New York, he was working an 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. shift in a factory that produced leather manicure kits for the Avon cosmetics company. Again manifesting an early facility for innovation, he designed a feature for a stitching machine that could stitch five or six pieces at the same time, thereby dramatically accelerating the factory’s production. Moreover, having received little education in Germany, he was eager to resume his self-education and he somehow found the time to study at the New York Public Library.
Six months later, after seeing a subway passenger reading an advertisement for education in the electronics field, he signed up for a correspondence course at the National Radio Institute in radio and television electronics, spending $1.25 out of his weekly $12 salary. Even before his graduation from the Institute in 1940 and commencing work as a radio service technician, he designed a model for reducing noise on 78 rpm records that pre-dated Dolby by several decades.
Although television was not then as popular as radio, not the least of which was because televisions were extremely expensive and still somewhat experimental, televisions had begun to emerge as a commercial product by 1937 and would go on to gain popularity after World War II. However, since both these means of transmission and communications relied upon functioning vacuum tubes and other components (such as capacitors and resistors), which would frequently burn out and require frequent mechanical maintenance, Baer found himself in a position to earn a decent wage in a burgeoning technology field.
However, in 1943, he was drafted into the army and sent to become a combat engineer at Fort Dix, N.J., where he encountered significant antisemitism from his fellow soldiers. Two months later, he was sent to Camp Ritchie in Maryland, which in 1942 had become the army’s first centralized military intelligence training center. With the focus of the center on training American soldiers who were fluent in German and Italian in intelligence, psychological warfare, and interrogation tactics and techniques, Baer found himself among other Jews who had fled Germany. As one of the famous “Richie Boys,” he became a recognized weapons expert, was awarded a medal for his marksmanship, and spent most his time collecting and writing information about different types of American, German, and Italian weapons. He also wrote a book on the history of machine guns, but it was never published. (It is currently at the Smithsonian Institute.)
Baer’s knowledge of and experiences in Germany also helped him to formulate various materials on German history, culture, and military, and he delivered lectures on Hitler’s background, his rise to power, and the ways in which German citizens were socialized as Nazis in the Third Reich. He was sent overseas, initially to Liverpool, where he and his squad educated British soldiers on various intelligence subjects, and then in Le Vésdinet, a suburb of Paris, where he worked on small arms weapons. In a contribution that earned him particular affection from his fellow servicemen, he fashioned radios from German mine detectors for them to listen to music and radio programming.
Upon his return to New York in 1946 after the war, Baer first began work for Emerson Radio, where he repaired nonfunctioning radio and television sets but, a short time later, he resigned to take advantage of G.I. Bill tuition benefits. However, notwithstanding his broad knowledge and indispensable experience, he found it difficult to find a university that would admit him, first because there were so many veterans pursuing similar plans but, more importantly, because his school records had been left behind somewhere in Germany and, in any event, Hitler had seen to it that he received little formal education. Finally, he was admitted to the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he worked with influential inventors such as Lee De Forest, who had invented the vacuum tube and discussed his project for a color television (which he would later patent) with him. At ATIT, Baer went on to earn the first Bachelor of Science degree in television engineering.
As the result of rising federal financial allocations for national defense spending during the Cold War period, and with research and development and manufacturing firms capitalizing on what has now become well-known as “the military-industrial-complex,” there were abundant opportunities for engineers like Baer. He went on to work primarily for private military defense companies throughout his career, beginning in 1949, when he commenced work for a short time building medical machines as an engineer for Wappler Inc., a small New York electro-medical equipment firm. He quit Wappler for a senior engineer position at Loral Electronics Corporation, a Bronx company where, as a defense contractor, he designed power line carrier signaling equipment and various electromechanical equipment, including military systems.
When he was commissioned at Loral to build a luxury, large screen television set with Leo Beiser, who would later pioneer laser beam information systems, Baer began thinking about what other possible uses televisions might have, and he hit upon the idea of including a games component in the televisions they were building. He presented his idea to Loral and, in one of the worst decisions in all of corporate history, the company expressed no interest in the project. He was sent back with instructions to continue working on the luxury television. When it failed to sell, however, and he was denied any reasonable raise in pay, he saw no future at Loral and took a position as a chief engineer at Transitron, where he successfully filed for two patents for his development of a transmitter that was half the weight and size of existing models.
After his first son was born in 1955, Baer moved his family to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he worked for Van Norman Industries, a machine tool manufacturing firm. However, unhappy with the company, he left to work for Sanders Associates, another New Hampshire defense contracting firm that had become broadly recognized as a leader in defense technology with a specialization in complex flexible circuit assemblies and printed wiring boards. (Sanders was later sold to Lockheed in 1995 and then to BAE Systems in 2000.)
At Sanders in the 1950s, Baer’s primary responsibility was supervising about five hundred engineers in the development of electronic systems being used for military applications, including devices for use in covert operations that monitored Soviet transmissions in their various forms. However, he had never given up on his general idea to transform the passive television screen into an entertaining platform for interactive games, but Sanders had no consumer electronics division. Nonetheless, he realized that the significantly lower prices for television sets – and the fact that most American homes were acquiring them – had opened up a huge potential market for other applications, and he began work in secret on his “game box,” which he called Channel L.P. (for “Let’s Play”).
Baer decided to present his idea to the Sanders board of directors and, in the first iteration of his design concept in 1966, he listed several games that he thought he could design for television sets, including action, board, instructional, chance, card, and sports games. His original schematic design shows the circuit building blocks needed to place two dots on a television that could then be manipulated and moved around on the screen. Collaborating with Bob Tremblay, an engineering technician at Sanders, he built an experimental unit to test his theoretical model: the first console to use vacuum tubes instead of the far more expensive and complex early circuit chips and the newly emerging transistor technology. When he presented the experimental unit to the Corporate Director of Research and Development, he cleverly spun it as a “gaming model,” a term of art used in military contracting, rather than as merely a toy.
The company green-lighted the project and gave Baer a $2,500 grant and, after sketching out game ideas with other Sanders engineers, within a year he came up with the original ideas for, among other things, adapting the “joysticks” of the aeronautical industry to his gaming console and developing technology to enable a user to point a light gun and to shoot at the screen. Of particular historical importance, he created the famous two-player table tennis game and, perhaps most significantly, he and his collaborators successfully built the “Brown Box” console video game system, so named because of the wood grain, self-adhesive brown vinyl that covered the console. The Brown Box, which turned televisions into interactive devices and launched the multi-billion-dollar era of video games, proved so successful that in an early demonstration and meeting with a patent examiner and his attorney, within minutes every examiner on the floor of the building was in that office wanting to play the game. Patented on April 17, 1973, it became jointly owned by Baer and BAE Systems.
Seeking a licensee for the system, Baer turned to various television manufacturers, many of whom – again, in a truly historic bad corporate decision – showed little interest in the unit. Finally, it was licensed in 1972 to Magnavox, which released it in September 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey, which initially contained twelve games, including Ping-Pong. As the first video game console for home use, it sold 130,000 units in its first year on the market, but Baer maintained that because, against his advice, it had been priced too high, it sold much fewer units than it should have. He was also unhappy because Magnavox only sold the units in its own retail stores and ran ads that gave the false impression that the units would only operate in a Magnavox television set. Nonetheless, it sold some 350,000 units by 1974.
Magnavox sued many video game developers for patent infringement and, in a seminal 1976 case against Atari for its tortious interference with Magnavox’s patent rights by using proprietary technology to design its “Pong” game, the court ruled against Atari based upon two significant factors. First, because of Baer’s military training and military contracting experience, he kept and maintained meticulous records, which proved invaluable in court in protecting Magnavox’s claims. Second, the court found that the Magnavox games contained or used a “play-controlled hitting symbol” invented by Baer pursuant to which players could manipulate symbols that could strike each other within a video game on a television screen (as, for example, the paddle hitting the ball in table tennis game).
After the decision, Atari purchased a non-exclusive cross-license from Magnavox to continue producing and selling Pong. (Thus, the belief that most people have that the first video game was Pong is mistaken.) Other ensuing legal decisions in Magnavox’s favor facilitated the ability of the company to maintain a near monopoly on the video gaming industry for some time.
After his dramatic success with the Brown Box, Baer was given bonuses and stock options and was afforded the opportunity to work on projects of his choosing. In what he characterized as “a piece of Jewish chutzpah,” he took advantage of his new freedom to work with research and development groups to create advanced display technology and video-based training and simulations using VCR’s, Video-Discs, DC-ROMs and digital computers, and he applied his video gaming acumen for military use by developing a precision rifle training apparatus for military training purposes.
In 1975, Baer established his own side consulting firm, R. H. Baer Consultants, through which he partnered with well-known companies including, for example, Hallmark, for whom he designed the first talking cards, and FTD Flowers, for whom he developed a recording device that allowed people to record a voice message onto a keepsake to be delivered along with the flowers. He also invented interactive talking stuffed animals, voice storage and playback devices for interactive children’s books, the electric light gun, a split keyboard organ, “talking tools” for children, and “Bike Max,” speaking bicycles that played back the bike’s speed, distance traveled, and warnings to prevent bicycle theft. Although few have ever even heard his name, let alone associated his name with it, Baer’s best-known game is probably the iconic Simon (1978), an electronic game of short-term memory skill that remains popular even today.
Baer apparently differentiated between the Third Reich, under which he had suffered and been forced to flee, with the modern German republic, which welcomed him on his first return there in 2006, when he donated one of his personal Brown Boxes to the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin. In 2008, he visited his birthplace in Pirmasens and donated another Brown Box to its Dynamikum Science Center there and, that same year, he donated many of his prototype inventions to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
When considering the developments in video gaming during the years before his death in 2014, Baer ruefully admitted that “I unleashed a monster.” Openly and vehemently opposed to violence in video games, he would have been even more horrified by today’s games, not only for their unrestrained, even celebratory, violence, but also because his intention was always to promote bringing families and friends together through his video games and loathed the very idea of antisocial users sitting alone in the dark and playing by themselves.
Baer’s funeral was held at Temple Adath Yeshurun in Manchester, where the family sat shiva, and he was buried at the Manchester Hebrew Cemetery next to his wife (see exhibit). The family requested that donations in his memory be made to the Temple, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or to the American Cancer Society.
Following his death, his workshop was removed from the basement of his Manchester home and brought intact to the Smithsonian, where it is now on permanent display in the museum’s Innovation Wing. One of the “Jewish mysteries” with which observers seem strangely preoccupied is the holographic ruler in his workshop that contains Hebrew letters in 33 of its 34 squares. The Ruler includes letters separately with and without dagesh, sofit letters and, as the Forward notes in an article, “it, somewhat mysteriously, leaves off the taf sans dagesh and instead includes two unexpected final letters.”
On April 8, 2021, the United States Mint announced that the American Innovation $1 Coin representing New Hampshire would recognize the invention of the first home video game console by Baer. The “heads” design features a dramatic representation of the Statue of Liberty in profile, and the “tails” design is intended to evoke the symbol of an arcade token: to the right side of the coin is one of Baer’s Brown Box games, “Handball;” the left side reads “New Hampshire” and “Player 1;” and encircling the outside of the coin is text intended to pay homage to Baer, “IN HOME VIDEO GAME SYSTEM” and “RALPH BAER.”
