Chicago physicist and inventor Leonard Reiffel played a key role in launching the Apollo moon missions and worked with the governments of Soviet republics in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
But one of Reiffel’s greatest claims to fame was inventing the telestrator, the video-marking device popularized by now-retired NFL color commentator John Madden and others to diagram and analyze an instant replay.
"It was great. It was something that television needed and football needed. To me, it’s still the ultimate tool to show what a team is doing," Madden said.
Reiffel, 89, died of complications from pancreatic cancer Saturday at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, said Romayne Rickhoff, a longtime friend and colleague.
Reiffel, who was a longtime Lincoln Park resident, was the son of a silversmith and a top official of the Chicago Board of Education. Reiffel grew up on the Northwest Side and graduated from Roosevelt High School in Chicago. Innovations were in his genes, as his father, Carl, developed and patented a musical instrument called the slide saxophone, a cross between a trombone and a saxophone.
Reiffel tinkered throughout his childhood and received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1947, at the age of 19. He then received a master’s degree in the same subject a year later and a doctorate in 1953. Reiffel also spent a year working with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Nuclear Studies.
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Reiffel’s first long-term job was with the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute — then known as the Armour Research Foundation — where he worked for 15 years. At one point, he managed a graduate student — future astronomer and author Carl Sagan. While at Armour, Reiffel led several departments, including physics, space science and geophysics.
In a letter to the journal Nature in May 2000, Reiffel revealed that he oversaw a highly classified plan, starting in 1958, to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon to demonstrate the United States’ military and technical power. The idea, conceived at the height of the Cold War and amid an arms race that the U.S. had appeared to be losing, ultimately was shelved after the Air Force concluded it was too risky.
Reiffel left Armour in 1965 to join NASA as the deputy director of its Apollo program office, where he worked until 1969. During his tenure at NASA, the Apollo 1 tragedy occurred, killing all three crew members in January 1967 at what now is Cape Canaveral.
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Reiffel also served as a science commentator for CBS and hosted "Backyard Safari," a children-oriented science show on Sunday mornings on WTTW-Ch. 11. His TV work led him to devise the idea for the telestrator, to help explain concepts better to viewers. Reiffel filed for a patent for it in the 1960s, and it first was used on his science show on Channel 11 in 1968.
Reiffel later improved the telestrator and persuaded WBBM-Ch. 2 weather forecaster John Coughlin to use it during his weather broadcasts. At the behest of then-Channel 2 sports anchor Johnny Morris, who instantly realized its potential, the telestrator made its national television debut during the 1982 Super Bowl, as a chalkboard to highlight players and plays.
"I wanted a way that you could show more players, but we couldn’t do it without a telestrator," Madden said. "It gave us the ability to identify multiple players when there’s multiple players in the picture. That’s a big, big thing, and it always will be."
After leaving NASA in 1969, Reiffel formed his own company specializing in technological writing. By the early 1970s, he formed Instructional Dynamics, later known as Interand Corp., which eventually produced two products: the telestrator and a videolike teleconferencing system.
Reiffel’s telestrator also made its way to Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center, allowing visitors to make electronic paintings.
A jack of many trades, Reiffel also wrote a syndicated newspaper column and for a time owned the Roxy Bar & Restaurant on Fullerton Avenue in Lincoln Park. He wrote several fiction and nonfiction books, including a 1979 novel, "The Contaminant."
Having multiple careers allowed Reiffel to "live multiple lives," he told the Tribune in 1987.
"The most frustrating thing is that in every turn you make, you give up other things," he said at the time.
After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Reiffel consulted with the governments of Soviet republics Belarus and Ukraine. And in 2002, he used his technical knowledge and his interest in verifying artwork to help authenticate paintings by Edouard Manet at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Reiffel shut down Interand in 1991, but he never stopped tinkering. In his 70s, he worked to produce a device to concentrate radiation in a targeted treatment area, and he continued to invent and file for patents into the 2010s.
A previous marriage ended in divorce. Reiffel is survived by his wife of 46 years, Nancy, and two sons, Evan and David.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
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