Born on 8 March 1922 in Pirmasens, Germany, Ralph Baer was expelled from school at the age of eleven because of his Jewish origins. He left the country with his family in August 1938 and settled in New York, in the Bronx. Baer worked in his mother's cousin's factory to support his family. At the same time, he took correspondence courses at the National Radio Institute and obtained his diploma in radio and television maintenance in 1940.
In 1943, he was conscripted into the army. This enabled him to enter university after the war, where he obtained the very first television engineering degree, in Chicago in 1949. He started out as chief engineer for an electro-medical equipment company, then in 1951 for Loral Electronicsin military electronics. He married in 1953 and continued his career at Transitronand finally joins Sanders Associates in 1956 as division manager, then engineer emeritus at Sanders-Lockheed until his retirement in 1987.
It was in 1966 that he had the idea of creating a system for playing video games on an ordinary television set. He developed numerous prototypes with his two partners, negotiated with various companies and worked on innovative projects such as games via cable networks. He also invented the very first optoelectronic gun for video games. His research led to the famous Brown Boxearly 1968.
But it wasn't until 1971 that the television manufacturer Magnavox buys the licence and markets it under the name Odyssey the following year, the very first games console in history. The machine met with a degree of success, selling 350,000 machines in two years, but competition soon became fierce, and there were numerous lawsuits against other manufacturers (notably Atari, whose Pong is a copy of the Odyssey ping-pong game) and Baer was unable to convince Magnavox to invest more in his later inventions related to this fledgling industry.
He is a consultant for some time for ColecoIn particular, he found them a very simple technique for offering games in colour, and helped design several machines. He also contributed to the development of theOdyssey² which was finally released in 1978, but failed to compete with the Atari VCS 2600 in the United States; instead, it enjoyed success in Europe under the name of Videopacas well as in South America.
At the end of the 1970s, Ralph Baer invented a number of successful electronic toys, including Simon or Maniac. During the 80s, he continued to create concepts that were way ahead of their time, such as using a camera to integrate faces into games and motion recognition! For 35 years he has continued to invent games and toys independently. Since 2005, he has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Technology in 2006 by President George W. Bush.
He was also inducted into the National Inventors' Hall of Fameis a medallist of the Institute of Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an engineer emeritus at Lockheed and holds an honorary doctorate of law. Ralph Baer passed away on 6 December 2014.
