Josef Kates, born Josef Katz, was a Canadian engineer whose achievements include designing the first digital game-playing machine, and the world's first automated traffic signalling system.
Early life and education
Born the fifth of six children in an Austrian-Jewish family, Josef Kates was the son of Baruch and Anna Katz. His parents ran a grocery store and an import-export business in Vienna. Kates fled to Italy to escape the Nazis after the Anschluss in 1938 and then, in 1939, joined the rest of his family which had fled to England. Kates enlisted in the British Army but, before he could see service, he and other Germans and Austrians resident in Britain were interned as enemy aliens. Kates was deported to Canada where he remained interned for almost two years until he and most of his fellow Jewish internees were recognised by the government as "victims of Nazi aggression" and released. At the camps in New Brunswick and Quebec, Kates fished, worked as a lumberjack, knitted socks and studied for his high school diploma through McGill University's high school matriculation program, placing first in Quebec's province-wide exams. After his release in 1942, he moved to Toronto where he met Lillian Kroch, marrying her in 1944. They had four children: Louis, Naomi, Celina and Philip A. He was educated at Goethe-Realschule ; McGill University ; University of Toronto.
Career
Kates started his career working for the Imperial Optical Company of Toronto in 1942, and was in charge of precision optics for Royal Canadian Navy equipment until he left in 1944. He then spent time working for Rogers Vacuum Tube Company,, for the next four years in the development and manufacturing of radar and radio tubes. He then began work in 1948 at the University of Toronto Computation Centre, where he participated in the design and building of UTEC, the first pilot model of a computer built in Canada. Kates also built the first digital game playing machine, the 13-foot tall Bertie the Brain, which was exhibited at the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The game was a version of Tic-tac-toe, with adjustable difficulty levels. The game machine controlled the lighting of an overhead display to show the progress of the game, and was built using a special electron tube, the Additron Tube, which Kates had invented. The Additron Tube did the work of ten existing radio tubes, reducing the size and complexity of the machine. With the advent of transistors, which were much smaller and required less power, the tube was not put into commercial use. Kates also designed Toronto's automated traffic signalling system in 1954 - the first in the world. Kates founded and became the President of KCS Ltd in Toronto between 1954 and 1966, which merged with the consulting arm of Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. to become Kates, Peat, Marwick & Co. in Canada, with other corporations in the US and the UK, for which he acted as a co-managing partner. He served as a computer consultant to many Canadian and American firms and organizations. He was involved in the creation of Setak Computer Services Corp. Ltd. which was based in Toronto; it offered computer access and consulting based on Burroughs computers, e.g. the B5500. Setak's employee Barry W. Ramer later went on to found Barry W. Ramer & Partners Ltd. and Ramer Data Consulting Ltd. Management Consulting in Calgary Alberta. In 1974 he founded Josef Kates Associates Inc., for which he acted as president. In 1968, he was appointed to the Science Council of Canada, and served as its chairman from 1975 to 1978. Kates was also chairman, CEO and director of Teleride Sage Ltd., and IRD Teleride followed until his retirement. In 2014, at the age of 93, Kates designed a proposed improvement for Toronto Transit Commission subway system. His wife, Lillian Kroch, died of cancer in 1993 after almost 50 years of marriage. In 1995, Kates married his second wife, Kay Hill. Kates died in Toronto on June 16, 2018.
