Biography of ralph baer thomas

Over the course of his life, his inventions and over U. 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. Sadly, his founding contributions have been generally forgotten in the wake of the almost inconceivable advances in contemporary video game technology and development.

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 , 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.

Ralph Baer was born March 8, , in Germany—a dangerous time and place for Jewish children and their families.

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. 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 — only two months before Kristallnacht.

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, immigrants from Germany who were permitted to enter the United States in — the family had two important advantages.

Born in south-western Germany.

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 a. 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.

Even before his graduation from the Institute in 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.