The father of home video games was not a garage hacker in 1970s California. He was Ralph Baer, a Jewish teenager who fled Nazi Germany in 1938, worked in a New York factory for $12 a week, and taught himself electronics through a correspondence course he spotted at a bus stop. This episode follows his path through Army military intelligence in London, an 18-ton collection of foreign weaponry he donated to museums, a 1949 degree in television engineering, and early jobs designing surgical devices and power-line signaling equipment.

It explains how that background let him see a passive CRT television as something whose synchronization pulses could be hijacked locally, why his 1951 pitch for a game module was rejected, and how in 1966 at defense contractor Sanders Associates he secured $2,500 and two engineers to build the Brown Box. The episo ...