Page 23 - TORCH Magazine - Issue #20

The world’s first ever video gaming console was released in 1972, but did you know that it was invented by a Jewish refugee who
fled the Holocaust?
Ralf Baer’s creation, the Magnavox Odyssey, was the revolutionary forerunner of modern gaming consoles that have brought joy to millions of adults and children throughout the decades. But his own childhood was marred under the oppressive cloud of Nazi persecution.
Originally named Rudolf Heinrich Baer, Ralph was born in 1922 in Pirmasens, a small
town in Germany. As
a Jew, he experienced
anti-Semitism first-
hand. When Ralph was
13, he was expelled
from school simply
for being a Jew. This
anti-Semitic discrimination was one of the early signs of what would follow as many of his peers would go on to perish in the Holocaust.
“I had the misfortune of being born in a horrendous situation,” Ralph Baer told the Computer History Museum. The then 13-year-old took a menial job in a shoe factory, among other places, where his boss told him he would never amount
to anything. Undaunted, the teenager proved the belittlers wrong by inventing a machine that automated what had been a task completed by hand – an early indicator of his innovative talent, not to mention his defiance.
In 1938, concerned about the increasing persecution,
Ralph’s parents, Lotte
and Leo, decided it
was necessary
for the family to escape Germany.
They left the country just two months before Kristallnacht, meaning ‘Night of Broken Glass’, when the Nazis burned synagogues, Jewish businesses and other properties belonging to Jews.
Arriving safely in New York where Ralph’s mother had relatives, Ralph resumed his self-education and took correspondence courses in radio and television electronics. Within a week
of arriving, Ralph, then 16, was working from 8am to 6pm in a factory that made leather cases for manicure kits. He soon invented a machine to speed up the
process that could stitch together five cases at once.
In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army to
fight in World War II. He was assigned to military intelligence at the US Army headquarters in London,
where Ralph put his German language to good use, decoding German intelligence messages for the Allies.
After the War, Ralph graduated
with a Bachelor of Science degree in Television Engineering, a pioneering field at the time, and began a long career in electrical engineering. Surgical cutting equipment and other medial engineering advances were among the things he designed, before moving
into sharing his military experience in the defence tech sector. It was during his time at a defence contractor called Sanders (now part of BAE), that Ralph
kept a close eye on the wave of televisions entering homes across
America and started to secretly explore the possibility of playing games on a
television
I had the
mIsfortune of
beIng born In
a horrendous
sItuatIon
CUFI.ORG.UK
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