Raymond C. Goertz

American mechanical engineer at Argonne National Laboratory who, working in the lab's Remote Control Engineering Division, built and documented what his own 1949 technical report calls "the first completely master-slave manipulator known to exist" — a mechanically linked device letting an operator's hand move tongs behind a shielding barrier in exact correspondence, developed for handling material too dangerous to touch directly. Matters to this vault as the earliest Tier-1-documented device in the "waldo" lineage: the class of hardware that the word (coined a few years earlier in Robert Heinlein's 1942 short story) later attached itself to — though Goertz's own report never uses the word.

References

• claim-goertz-1949-argonne-anl-4311-first-master-slave-manipulator — the 1949 ANL-4311 report itself, direct primary read
• claim-waldo-coinage-heinlein-1942-to-nuclear-teleoperators — the broader coinage claim this device corroborates
• claim-character-shops-waldo-rationale-omits-goertz-and-argonne — the finding that Goertz is not named in the trademark's own naming story, despite building the earliest device in the class