Ralph Benjamin

Benjamin was born in Darmstadt, Germany. He attended boarding school in Switzerland from 1937, and was sent to England in 1939 as a refugee. He studied at Ellesmere College and at Imperial College London^[1] where he graduated with a 1st class honours in Electronic Engineering. He joined the Royal Naval Scientific Service in 1944, beginning his career at the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment (ASWE).

Benjamin invented the first trackball called roller ball in 1946,^[2] patented in 1947.^[1] Between 1947 and 1957^[3] he developed the first force-wide integrated Command and Control System. This included patenting the use of an interlaced cursor controlled by a tracker ball to link displays to stored digital information, the first ever digital compression of video data, and the creation of the navy's first digital data link and network which is still in use NATO-wide as "Link 11".

During the fifties and sixties he was a leading member of the national Advanced Computer Techniques Project and in 1961 he was acting international chairman NATO "Von Karman" studies on "Man and Machine" and "Command and Control".

From 1961 to 1964 he was Head of Research and Deputy Director, Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment then in 1964 he became Chief Scientist Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment (AUWE), combined with Director, AUWE, and MoD Director Underwater Weapons R&D – posts he held until 1971. Original publications during this time resulted in a Doctorate of Science (DSc) and he published a textbook on "Modulation, Resolution and Signal processing"^[4] that was later unofficially translated into Russian. He also trained as a navy diver to better understand some of the challenges faced by the Royal Navy.