MoPR Mobility Minute: Walkie Talkies
Three names are associated with Walkie Talkies. Alfred J. Gross (1918 – 2000), Donald Hings (1907 – 2004) and Paul Galvin (1895 – 1959). But it appears that Canadian-born/American-raised inventor Alfred Gross built the first portable radio device in 1938 (Canadian Hings built his portable radio for the Canadian military in 1942). Gross, who has a number of US patents for mobile radio technology, once demonstrated his invention to a secret classified meeting of the FCC in 1944. The demonstration inspired FCC Commissioner E. K. Jett to write an article, “Phone Me By Air,” published in the Saturday Evening Post in July, 1945:
“Now, for good or evil, comes the Walkie-Talkie for civilians. Just radio, ‘Bring home an extra lamb chop,’ or, ‘I want to report a strange man’ – You can keep quiet, if you wish – but you probably won’t.”
The era of mass mobile communications predicted by Jett was still decades away, however.
Paul Galvin’s company, The Galvin Manufacturing Company (later renamed Motorola), mass produced the Walkie Talkie for the US Military in the lead up to and during World War II.
The journeyman Walkie Talkie was the SCR-300 made by Galvin’s company, which delivered nearly 50,000 for Allied Forces in both the European and Pacific war theaters. When we think about Walkie Talkies today, we think about small handheld devices. But in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Walkie Talkie equipment was fitted into backpacks and weighed approximately 35 pounds.
By 1942 the first handheld radios — or Handy-Talkies — were deployed.
Communications devices were becoming more portable. But these devices used radio frequencies in the same way radio stations do. A broadcast of signals from the transmitting device to any receiver within range. Not exactly private or secure. And not without other problems, too. For example, military radios were often jammed by the enemy to disrupt communications. Network-based communications was still to come.
More information on Walkie-Talkies and Handy-Talkies can be found on the US Army Signal Center online museum of Fort Gordon, GA.
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