Roizen, Joseph

Joseph (Joe) Roizen, television and video engineer, author, and consultant, was born from Russian emigrants on September 9th, 1923 in Kishinev, Romania. His father Berl (Boris) and his mother Brana (Betty) had previously escaped from Russia. The Roizen family emigrated to North America a few months later. They ended up at the end of the 1920s in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, in the Laurentians area (Québec) where Boris was treated for tuberculosis and where their second child Molly was born in 1930. Sometime after the father’s death in 1935, the family moved to Montreal.

Joe attended the Ste. Agathe Protestant Elementary School and then, in Montreal, the Baron Byng High School at the end of the 1930s. His main interests were in the sciences and electronics. He attended also evening courses in electricity at the Montreal Technical Institute. He then attended Sir George Williams College in 1941 and 1942 where he was the photographer of various student activities. Some of his photographs appeared in the 1942 SGW College yearbook. It seems it was during this period that he developed a lifelong love of photography. With the war’s out break he became the rear-seater radioman in testing Helldiver carrier fighterbombers at Fairchild. After the war he started companies that he was forced to abandon. He ended up working at Trans-Canada Airlines, in radio.

Joe married Gisela Holl in 1943. They had three children: Ron (b. 1943), Peter (b. 1946), Heidi (b. 1958). The family moved to California in 1948, where Joe worked first for Pacific Mercury and later on for Ampex. For this company he participated in the videotaping of the 1959 exchanges between Nixon and Krushchev in Moscow, known as the Kitchen Debate. Joe and Gisela divorced in the 1960s. In 1971, Joe founded his own company, Telegen. The same year, he married Donna Foster. Joe and Donna leaved in Portola Valley, California.

Joseph Roizen was a prolific author whose articles have been published in many trade publications (e.g. Electronics World and Radio-Electronics). He also contributed chapters to technical books (e.g. Videotext: the coming revolution in home/office information retrieval / edited by Efrem Sigel, 1980).

Joe Roizen died on March 1, 1989, while attending a meeting of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Paris.

2015-05-14
Revised 2017-06-07