(Gross also invented the pager and wireless phone, so even if he wasn’t the outright inventor, he has other claims to success.) “Without taking anything away from Gross’ accomplishment, Hings' CM&S field radios were already in production at that time,” the Hings website states. (He didn’t come up with the walkie-talkie term, instead calling it a “pack set.”)Ī website dedicated to Donald Hings’ memory suggests that there were examples of Hings’ invention in use as early as 1937, predating a similar invention by Canadian-American inventor Al Gross, who built his own ham radio in the early 1930s, but expressed a desire to create a portable version- which he successfully built in 1938, soon handing his idea to the U.S. Hings, an employee of a Canadian mining company who came up with the device as a way to help workers in remote areas communicate with one another. The person with the strongest case for inventing the walkie talkie, though, is perhaps Donald L. It was an idea that a lot of people had around the same time, and all added their own twist on the equation. Army, which popularized it among an audience of soldiers who used it to communicate in the field. More complicated is the question of who invented it-with credit being given to both individual inventors, Galvin Manufacturing Corporation (later known as Motorola), and the U.S. Before the cell phone, it changed the dynamic of communication into something where you could talk to someone a long distance away while still having the flexibility of mobility.Īnd it had its original moment in the sun around World War II. The portable two-way radio, eventually known as the walkie-talkie, was the perfect example of this in action. (Of course, a lot of behind-the-scenes lobbying for spectrum followed.) ( Wikimedia Commons) The walkie-talkie has its roots in World War IIĮarly on, radio technology was an area full of excitement, as inventors would come up with novel uses for the airwaves that would create new ways of thinking about how people interacted. A signaler with the SCR-536 walkie talkie, the first hand-held model.
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