Jewish Invention Myths: The Walkie-Talkie

Jewish Invention Myths are a bit like one of those of huge ice creams that some ice cream parlours serve to customers to test whether they can actually eat all that ice cream in that you know there is an end, but it never seems to be in sight. So, let’s take one more step towards that end by addressing yet another jewish invention myth: the walkie-talkie.

‘MNews’ credits this to a jewish inventor named Alfred Gross:

‘Alfred Gross – Pager, walkie-talkie

Radio engineer Alfred Gross was a pioneer in mobile wireless communication. He was one of the inventors behind the walkie-talkie, pager, and the cordless telephone.’ (1)

‘Boulder Jewish News’ agrees with this assertion. (2)

The problem is that this simply isn’t true.

The first walkie-talkie was created by a Polish inventor named Henryk Magnuski he patented in Poland in 1935 (3) with Magnuski a few years later also being heavily involved in the creation of Motorola’s first walkie-talkie (the SRC-536) in 1939. (4)

The Canadian inventor Donald Hings also came up with the first portable signalling system using a walkie-talkie system in 1937, (5) while Alfred Gross only developed his walkie-talkie in 1938 three years after Magnuski and one year after Hings. (5)

So, no Alfred Gross didn’t invent the walkie-talkie; Henryk Magnuski did!

References

(1) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions

(2) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/

(3) https://uprp.gov.pl/sites/default/files/wup/1936/04/wup04_1936.pdf, p. 14

(4) Ned Chase, 1952, ‘Motorola’, Signal, Vol. 6, No. 4, p. 21

(5) https://web.archive.org/web/20191106215506/http://lemelson.mit.edu/winners/al-gross