Inventor of modern email Raymond Tomlinson dies at 74

(Image credit: Miguel Riopa/AFP/Getty Images)

published 7 March 2016

Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email, died Saturday. He was 74.

Up until his death, Tomlinson was a principal scientist with Raytheon, and the company announced his death on Sunday. Tomlinson received degrees in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT, and in 1971, he invented the first email that could be sent to someone at a specific address. It was made for the ARPANET system, a precursor to the internet created for the government, The Associated Press reports. "It wasn't an assignment at all, he was just fooling around," Raytheon spokeswoman Joyce Kuzman said. "He was looking for something to do with ARPANET."

When he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, Tomlinson said that he was "often asked, 'Did I know what I was doing?' The answer is, yeah, I knew exactly what I was doing. I just had no notion whatsoever about what the ultimate impact would be." It was also Tomlinson who chose the "@" symbol for email addresses, a "symbol that probably would have gone away if not for email," Kuzman told AP. He was respected for his work, she added, and people enjoyed working with him. "He was so patient and generous with his time," she said. "He was just a really nice, down-to-earth, good guy."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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