"I don't own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time."
Mitch Hedberg, comedian
Alfred J. Gross (1918-2000), inventor of the pager, had a lifelong passion for communication devices. As a boy he built his own radio set from junk materials, and, by the age of sixteen, he had earned his amateur radio operator's license, the beginning of a career in the radio communications industry.
The pager was originally developed as a tool for the medical profession, and was first introduced in a New York hospital. The devices responded to specific high-frequency radio signals and beeped to alert doctors to an emergency. They were not well received in the medical profession, however, with some doctors complaining that the beeping of the device would annoy patients, or even interrupt their golf swing. But the pager soon proved to be a useful device and became an essential tool for the medical profession.
The idea gradually spread outside of the medical community, with the first commercial pager available in 1974, and it became a must-have gadget. While the earliest pagers simply beeped to alert the user, later ones had a small display, allowing a message to be sent. However, the short message format meant that users had to rely on codes and shorthand.
Unfortunately for Gross, his ideas were ahead of their time, becoming popular only long after their patents had run out, meaning he never earned any money from their widespread popular use.
