Leonard Reiffel

Leonard Reiffel (September 30, 1927 – April 15, 2017) was an American physicist, author and educator. Born in Chicago, Reiffel was an electrical engineering student for a number of years before entering into research fields. He collaborated with Enrico Fermi, Carl Sagan, and members of Operation Paperclip.

Reiffel also worked for NASA and the Illinois Institute of Technology, and won a Peabody Award for his work on the radio program The World Tomorrow. His experience with broadcasting led him to invent the telestrator as a visual aid for his programming; Reiffel held over fifty different patents for his inventions.

Early life

Reiffel was born in Chicago on September 30, 1927. His father was Carl Reiffel, a silversmith credited with inventing a slide saxophone. His mother, the former Sophie Miller, was a district superintendent in the Chicago public school system. The younger Reiffel attended Theodore Roosevelt High School, before earning a bachelor's and master's degree as well as a doctorate in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology between 1947 and 1953. Reiffel also collaborated with German scientists recruited in America as part of Operation Paperclip, working on an early prototype for a railgun. to become deputy director of the project, a post he held from 1965 to 1969. During this time, Reiffel was also put in charge of Project A119, a United States Air Force project intending to detonate a nuclear warhead on the Moon. Reiffel worked alongside Carl Sagan and Gerard Kuiper on the project. Reiffel also chaired the Interagency Manned Space Flight Experiments Board for several years, a body which worked alongside NASA, the United States Air Force, and the United States Department of Defense. In 1979, he published the science fiction novel The Contaminant.