Albert Weinstein, an engineer who helped invent a remote-controlled toy car, worked on weapons, radar and lasers for the U.S. Defense Department, and designed solar energy systems for Westinghouse, died Jan. 1 at a care center in Springfield, Virginia. He was 98.
The cause was hypertensive arteriosclerotic heart disease, said a daughter, Janis Dietz.
In an engineering career of more than 40 years, Weinstein worked 10 years for Westinghouse and more than 30 for the federal government, and he represented the Defense Department at international scientific meetings overseas.
But he was an inventor by avocation and the recipient of eight U.S. patents. In that line of endeavor came his fleeting brush with fame, early in his career.
According to a 1953 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine: “In 1949 Albert Weinstein, a professional inventor from Alexandria, Virginia, got an idea for a remote-controlled toy car. He steered it with an air pressure bulb, but he had no idea how to power it.”
So, the magazine wrote, Weinstein found someone who made a tiny electric motor powered by flashlight batteries and a toy company that was making a plastic scale model of a car.
They joined forces to produce the first remote-controlled toy car, capable of moving forward and backward, and racing and traveling in circles. It was an “immediate sensation,” the magazine reported.
When Britain’s then-Princess Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, visited Canada in 1951, newspapers published photographs of the couple marveling at a demonstration of Weinstein’s toy car in Windsor, Ontario.
Albert Weinstein was born May 31, 1916, in Brooklyn. His parents were immigrant Jews, his mother from Warsaw, his father from Minsk in what then was Imperial Russia. He graduated in 1937 from City College of New York with a bachelor’s degree in physics.
During World War II, he was a Navy radar officer. From 1946 to 1967, he worked for the Navy and then the Defense Department in jobs that included guidance and control of air-launched missiles, and research and technology.
From 1967 to 1972, he was director of research and technology at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He joined Westinghouse in 1972 and retired in 1982 as president of Westinghouse Solar Heating and Cooling.
He taught cosmology — the study of the origin and structure of the universe — at Mount Vernon Unitarian Church in Alexandria and later at Greenspring Village, a retirement community in Springfield where he spent the last years of his life.
His marriage to Joan MacMullen ended in divorce. Their daughter Linda Lasky died in 2002.
Survivors include three children, Janis Dietz of Upland, California, Suzanne Weinstein of State College, Pennsylvania, and Robert Weinstein of Hollywood, Florida; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
For most of his life, Weinstein had a basement workshop at home, and it was there that he pursued his inventions.
Most of his patents, but not all, were related to work he did for the Department of Defense. One, called “Turnatune,” was for a device similar to a player piano. Two others were for navigational instruments for recreational sailors called “Sailometer” and “Wind Wizard,” which measured wind speed and the speed of a sailboat.
Weinstein sailed on the Chesapeake Bay, often with a friend, Alan Bligh. On the waters of the bay, Bligh was always addressed as “Captain Bligh,” after the tyrannical real-life British officer portrayed in the book and films of “Mutiny on the Bounty.”
For his role in the invention of the remote-controlled toy car, Weinstein made some money but not a fortune. The company making the car went bankrupt, and Weinstein settled for a payment of $20,000, his daughter said, a generous sum for the time but not enough to guarantee a life of ease.