---
title: "Raymond C. Goertz"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Raymond C. Goertz"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["master-slave manipulator","Argonne National Laboratory","teleoperation","waldo (etymology)","nuclear remote handling"]
seek_code_commit: "290e6f6"
---


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