February 2004
Walk the Talk
Al Gross's 1938 invention of the walkie-talkie launched mobile communications.
By Lisa Scanlon
In the late 1930s, Al Gross, a teenage ham radio enthusiast in Cleveland, OH, built some handheld devices that allowed his friends and him to communicate on an unused portion of the radio frequency band; he named his creation the "walkie-talkie." Although Gross's innovation later played an important part in World War II, neither it nor his other major inventions became commercially successful until many years after his patents expired.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology