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Industry, by adoption
On the record
Not a native, a New Hampshire engineer whose “Brown Box” became the Odyssey because of a decision taken at Magnavox headquarters here (see “The Magnavox Odyssey was invented in Fort Wayne.”). The record lists him under adoption, not birth: the distinction is the point of this site.
The inventor behind the machine was Ralph Henry Baer, born Rudolf Heinrich Baer on 8 March 1922 at Rodalben, Germany; his Jewish family fled to the United States in 1938. An engineer at Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire, from 1956, Baer began in 1966 to experiment with playing games on ordinary television sets, and his seventh prototype — the "Brown Box" — became the blueprint of the home video game console. The Fort Wayne connection is the licensee: in 1971 Magnavox, headquartered in Fort Wayne, became Sanders's first video-game licensee, completed the design, and released it in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey, the world's first commercial home video game console; it sold in the hundreds of thousands between 1972 and 1975 and carried Baer's first home light gun. Baer went on to contribute to the Simon electronic game and held more than 150 patents before his death at Manchester, New Hampshire, on 6 December 2014. The Smithsonian, which holds his papers, credits him as a pioneer of the entire medium.
Find them on this page
- § 06 — people of the record
From § 06, People of the record, and the sources cited there; Smithsonian Institution, Ralph H. Baer Papers finding aid (NMAH.AC.0854); Wikipedia, "Ralph H. Baer."