Ken Schaffer

Ken Schaffer is an inventor and a lot more. In the late 1960s, he was a publicist for rock stars, managing the public image of Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, and even choosing Alice Cooper's name. A lifelong amateur radio enthusiast, in the 1970s he invented the wireless microphone and then the wireless guitar, making more than a thousand mikes at $4,400 a pop for the Rolling Stones and nearly every other big rock group. When Mick Jagger dances around the stage, he is carrying a Schaffer mike. What made a Schaffer mike or guitar worth so much wasn't just that it kept rock stars from being electrocuted (KISS switched to Schaffer after a band member was seriously injured), but that they sounded so good. NASA eventually became a customer to use Schaffer's innovative preprocessing circuits to improve astronaut voice communication. In the 1980s, Schaffer fell in love with Russia and started a company to bring modern voice communication to western companies operating there, later selling that company to Comsat, the biggest player in satellite communication. Schaffer built a system for Columbia University to allow Soviet Studies students to watch live Russian TV by tapping non-geosynchronous satellite broadcasts with an 11-foot dish on a rooftop in Manhattan.

*Added note Schaffer's ex-wife, a famous Russian TV actress, played Uncle Junior's one-legged Russian nurse, who ended up having sex with Tony Soprano.