Paul was the North American editor of Park World, GAP’s sister publication, for 33 years. His love of roller coasters began at the age of 5. He went on to visit nearly 400 parks worldwide and travelled an estimated 10,000 miles on more than 910 different roller coasters.
Prior to his role on Park World, Paul had a very successful career as an optical engineer and lens designer at Bausch & Lomb, 3M Wollensak, and Eastman Kodak before becoming an independent consultant in lens design. His work resulted in 41 patents in the fields of zoom lens systems, photographic objectives, projection lenses, visual systems, and microscope objectives, and six published papers. During his 29 years at Kodak he designed the lens systems found in several generations of Pocket Instamatic cameras, available light movie cameras, zoom lenses for movie cameras, and the optical systems in Kodak Instant Cameras. As an independent he developed an ultra micro miniaturisation lens that led to the development of tiny computer chips. He was an emeritus member of the Optical Society of America.
Media director Paul Ryder has released the following statement:
“We are all very sad to hear the news that Paul Ruben has passed away and our thoughts are with his family and friends.
“I had the pleasure of working with Paul for over 10 years and will very much miss his second to none sense of humour and storytelling.
“His enthusiasm for the Theme Park industry and in particular Rollercoasters seem to meet no boundaries. This fantastic industry that we work in has truly lost one of its greats.”
Park World editor, Becci Knowles said: “I first met Paul at IAAPA 2018 and he immediately took me under his wing, introducing me to the world of white knuckle rides like never before. He was the consummate professional to the end and along with the everyone at Park World, I shall miss him greatly. The industry won’t be the same without him.”
Park World will be sharing Paul’s story in full in the next issue and would welcome members of the industry to share their thoughts and memories by emailing bknowles@datateam.co.uk