Irving “Al” Gross, a.k.a. Al Gross was a pioneer in mobile wireless communication. He created and patented many communications devices, specifically in relation to an early version of the walkie-talkie, Citizens’ Band radio, the telephone pager and the cordless telephone
Gross was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1918, the son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants, he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States.

His lifelong enthusiasm for radio was sparked at age nine, when traveling on Lake Erie by a steamboat.[5] While sneaking around the boat he ended up in the radio transmissions room. The ship’s operator let him listen in on transmissions. Later, Gross turned the basement of his house into a radio station, built from scavenged junkyard parts.

At sixteen he earned his amateur radio license, and he used his call sign (W8PAL) his whole life.

His interest and knowledge in radio technology had grown considerably by the time he in 1936 entered the BSEE program at Cleveland’s Case of Applied Sciences (now a part of Case Western Reserve University). He was determined to investigate the unexplored frequency region above 100 MHz. Between 1938 and 1941, soon after the invention of the walkie talkie in 1937 by Donald Hings, he created and patented his own version of the “walkie-talkie”.After the war the FCC allocated the first frequencies for personal radio services; the Citizens’ Radio Service Frequency Band (1946). Gross formed Gross Electronics Co [2] to produce two-way communications system to utilize these frequencies, and his company was the first to receive FCC approval in 1948. He sold more than 100 thousand units of his system, mostly to farmers and the U.S. Coast Guard.