"Al Gross Remembered"
By Ted Rappaport, Virginia Tech
Al Gross had a love for discovery, and an even greater love for teaching others what he found out "the hard way, before the transistor or the calculator."
I first met Al Gross in 1990, when he was demonstrating his early walkie-talkie and transistor radio inventions at the Vehicular Technology Conference in St. Louis. Al had his early prototypes in a small black suitcase, the size of a large lunchbox. In the box were his early walkie-talkies - 1939 vintage, a crude pager - ala 1950, and a tiny short wave receiver the size of his index finger, which he built in 1956. Al was surrounded by a crowd as he showed off his inventions, decades ahead of their time.
Al always had a crowd around him. His enthusiasm for wireless communications was infectious, and he had an uncanny ability to light up a room with his unbridled fascination and excitement for the evolution of electronics miniaturization and the realization of his dream of personal communications. I wound up spending eight hours with Al the next day, skipping all of the technical sessions, just listening to how he became hooked on wireless at the age of 8. We became good friends after that meeting in St. Louis, and Al and his wife, Ethel, visited Virginia Tech often.
Al loved to share the memories of how he developed his early walkie-talkie circuits on ceramics, and how he wrote to Edwin Armstrong (the inventor of FM) for advice on superhetrodyne receiver design. Al would reminisce how Jack Kilby (IC pioneer and Texas Instruments cofounder) helped him make his first walkie-talkie circuit using ceramic and bakelite materials to reduce frequency drift -- his walkie-talkies had tubes in them and operated at about 400 MHz. Al would also talk of his run-in with David Sarnoff at RCA, who attempted to sue him for patent infringement on the walkie-talkie, and how he had successfully defended his case. Al was perhaps most proud of the fact that he was able to help convince the FCC and its head engineers in 1948 to provide for a license-free part of spectrum that would support personal communications. This later became known as Citizen's Band (CB) radio.
On several occasions, Al Gross visited Virginia Tech to give seminars to the entire electrical engineering student body -- undergraduates and graduate students alike. After each one of these lectures, inevitably a swarm of young engineering students would gather at the front of the lecture hall, to hold the original walkie-talkie or to just shake hands with the man who had pioneered personal wireless communications using a slide rule to compute wavelengths. After one of these late afternoon lectures, an interested student stayed to talk with Al until ten in the evening, right there in the lecture hall! Al eventually invited the student back to his hotel room where they continued the discussions until midnight! When Al told me of the incident the next day, I wasn't at all surprised.
On one of his visits to Blacksburg, I asked Al if he would be willing to visit the elementary school where my children attended, and he lit up with a huge grin. "I love to tell children about wireless," Al explained, and the next day, Al was mesmerizing the entire Gilbert Linquous elementary school with how radio works and how electronics had evolved during his lifetime. He was a hit, and received dozens of walkie-talkie drawings and thank you letters from the students a few weeks later. When my son, Matt, wrote his entrance exam to college, he chose to write about Al Gross, the enthusiastic inventor and teacher he had gotten to know as a family friend.
Al Gross had many interests. He built his own metal detectors in the 1950's and found buried treasure on some of America's civil war battlefields. He developed aerospace technology, such as the proximity fuse, that later flew on early space vehicles. In the last few years, he had spent a great deal of time telling interested engineering or historic groups about his experience as an inventor and entrepreneur in the very early days of portable wireless communications. He was still employed, at Orbital Sciences Corp. until the end. Al Gross passed away on December 21, 2001. We will miss him.
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