While preparing a talk on Thomas Fogarty, of balloon catheter fame, I stumbled on information about a different gentleman who was a joint winner with Fogarty of the much coveted MIT-Lemelson prize. This person is someone who affects nearly all doctors every day. Indeed, if he had not recently died, I am sure many of us would love to get our hands on him. However, as you read on and discover what a truly remarkable man he was, you may see him and his invention in a different light.
Al Gross was born in 1918 in Toronto but grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He had a childhood interest in amateur radio and went on to study for a diploma in electronics. He was a bright student, and his area of interest lay in unexplored radio frequencies above 100 MHz. He wanted to invent a small, mobile, two way radio, and by1938, two years into his diploma, he had invented the first handheld radios (“walkie-talkies”), which could communicate for up to 30 miles. These caused quite a stir with the military, who deemed their invention as “top secret.” They quickly commandeered the idea and furthered its use to introduce ground to air communication for fighter pilots and to detonate bombs at a distance, such as for blowing up bridges.
After time, these long range radios were made public knowledge, and, as a result, in 1946 citizen band (CB) radio was invented, the familiar mode of communication of taxi drivers and truckers.
A more sinister twist in Gross's career occurred in 1949, when he invented the telephone pager system. However, his first large scale attempt to sell pagers to doctors did not meet with the success he had anticipated. “In Philadelphia, there was a hospital convention, and we set up the pager there. We demonstrated the pager to all the hospital administrators, doctors, and nurses, and they absolutely refused to go along with the idea,” said Gross. “They claimed it would disturb the patient, the nurses wouldn't want to carry it, and the doctors would be disturbed in their game of golf.”
Although the idea initially failed to catch on, New York's Jewish Hospital did install his paging system in 1950, and the Federal Communications Commission officially approved it in 1958, marking the era of mass production. The name “pager” is derived from the Motorola Pageboy 1, one of the first commercially available models.
As we are daily reminded, pagers are here to stay. Recent estimates suggest that there are now over 60 million pagers in use worldwide. All I can say in their defence is that, when you are out on a Saturday night in the rain, and taxi control gets a cab to you in five minutes using CB radio communication, perhaps you will see your pager in a different light.