How Pagers Work

the last episode of tech Stuff. I'm recording in the year seventeen, although you are hearing it in the year eighteen, So you're listening to me from the past, unless you're in the chat room at twitch dot tv slash slash tech Stuff, in which case you're actually watching me record it right now, So you're hearing a episode seventeen, in which case, uh, we traveled to the future. That's how

time works. And speaking of time, you know, I've I've covered some cutting edge technologies recently and talked about blockchain, which will be an episode coming up soon. That's all about the technology of the future. Well, I want to talk about the technology of the past today and talk about pagers or beepers. Uh, something that's classic, right, the

humble pager. The beeper This is the device that gives you an alert to an incoming message, so as you can dash out of a theater in dramatic fashion to make an important phone call on a pay phone outside. Oh yeah, there used to be pay phones too. So where did pagers come from and how do they work? So that's our focus of our show today. So to start, we're gonna take a trip all the way back to nineteen twenty one, which was a tumultuous year. Socialism and

communism were sweeping Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. Russia was expanding its borders and invading various nations to claim them for its own. Northern Ireland got its own parliament in nine. Adolf Hitler would become the fearer of the Nazi Party in nineteen twenty one, and the first White Castle Hamburger joint opened in Wichita, Kansas in nineteen twenty one,

spelling doom for us all. But also in that year, the Detroit Police Force implemented what is generally agreed upon as the precursor to pagers, and that system was actually a one way radio communication system, which when you boil a pager down, that's what your typical pager is. By the way, don't boil down pagers, it will ruin them. But a pager ultimately is a receiver that's at one end of a radio communications system. Let's get back to

those Detroit police. So it's the nineteen twenties and the United States was dealing with some pretty serious crime. This was an era of bank robberies and bootlegging. Prohibition, that's the era that made alcohol illegal in the United States began in nineteen twenty and it would remain in effect

until December nineteen thirty three. The constitutional amendment that outlawed the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol in the United States created enormous opportunity for criminals because people love their hooch, and so it became incredibly profitable to smuggle alcohol. Gangsters made a fortune off of bootlegging and other illegal activities, and the police were largely unprepared to deal with this

problem in the major metropolitan areas. This was before two way radios were small enough to fit into police cruisers, and so there was no easy way to send out a message among a police force to have them close in on the bad guys. But three Detroit police officers, Kenneth our Cox, Walter Vogler, and Bernard Fitzgerald, had an idea. They experimented by putting radio sets in the back seats of their model t Ford police patrol cars, and yeah,

it took up pretty much the whole seat. The radio sets weren't special in any way, and though they could pick up a signal, they weren't terribly consistent. They also didn't operate on a special bandwidth, which meant police back at HQ, but have to broadcast on a normal channel, which could be picked up by anyone with a radio set. So if you wanted to listen in on police radio, which again was just a one way communication from headquarters to a few cruisers that had radio sets, you could

do it. In fact, in order to operate, the Detroit Police Force had to register their police radio station as an entertainment station and they would play recorded music whenever they weren't reading off lists of stolen vehicles or other criminal information. And the call sign for this radio station was ko P COP. Pretty cute, right, all that's true? By nine Kenneth Cox, one of those three police officers, and an engineering student named Robert L. Bats built a

radio set specifically for a vehicle. It was stable, it had its own antenna, and the antenna could attached to the car, and the Detroit Police Force began to install those kinds of systems into cruisers for real. In n the Detroit Police for became the first law enforcement agency to dispatch police cars by radio. Other cities would soon follow that lead, and it might be a good idea to have a brief refresher on how radio communication works.

With one way communication, you're working with a transmitter and a receiver. We'll look at both of these components. Will start with the transmitter first, you need a power supply. Next along the chain of components is a device called an oscillator, which creates an alternating current at a particular frequency. And typically you'd use the oscillator to create a sign wave. This would serve as your basic radio signal, also known as the carrier signal. But here's a problem. That signal

carries no information. You could send it out, but it would just be blank. It would be nothing to send information along such a signal. You have to modify the signal in some way, and with radio as you do this with a modulator. Modulators affect the sign waves sent by radio signals in some fundamental way. There are two main approaches to doing this. There's amplitude modulation or a M That involves increasing or decreasing the amplitude or intensity

of the sign waves. So if you draw a sign wave out going from left to right, the height of the peaks and the depth of the troughs, that's your amplitude. So if you make them taller and you make the troughs deeper, you're increasing the amplitude of that wave. Then there's frequency modulation or FM, which involves changing the frequency of a radio wave. So that involves decreasing the wave length now so that you have more of these waves pass a given point within a second. That's your frequency.

So if you think again about this is a time function. You've got this form of a wave. It passes through a point. Let's say that it's fast enough where a thousand of them pass a point a specific point in space every second. That's a thousand hurts. That's one thousand wavelengths per second. If you were to decrease that, you know, decrease the length of the waves, they're still traveling at the same speed, but now there's they're squished, right, you get more waves in per second. Now it might be

five thousand or five thousand hurts. It's five thousand wavelengths per second. So next you would typically have an amplifier and that would take this signal and create an amplified version of it, which then gets sent to an antenna, a transmittle emitter antenna. The antenna essentially converts this electrical signal into radio waves, which propagate out from the antenna

into the surrounding environment. The amplifier and antenna determine how far the signal will carry, So when you hear about transmitters and how powerful they are, you're really thinking about what's the amplification. Uh And some radio broadcast towers have much greater amplification than others, which is why you can pick them up further away than the their their counterparts. Now on the receiver side, you have a very similar series of components. First, we'll start with the receiver's antenna.

We're gonna go from where the signal comes in and work our way inward. So the antenna captures the radio waves, or rather we could say the radio waves induce an alternating current to flow through the antenna that goes to an amplifier, which detects this electrical signal and boosts it so that a detector can separate the relevant information from

the base carrier sign wave. In audio radios, you also have a couple of other elements, like a tuner, because there are lots of different frequencies you can broadcast at, so a tuner allows you to tune into that band of frequencies um and it ignores everything else, so that way you can just concentrate on the radio station you want to hear. Otherwise you would get all radio stations all the time, and that would be annoying. You also have an audio amplifier, typically in your regular sumer radio.

That I mean you have to otherwise you're not gonna hear anything that boosts the signal, so it's strong enough to make the speakers work. So essentially, what you're doing is you're taking some information, you transform that information into electrical signals. You use that to modify a carrier wave. You amplify that wave and send it out over in antenna to create radio signals. Those radio signals get picked up by a receiver's antenna and essentially revert that receiver

reverses this process. Now, I mentioned that Detroit started using this one way radio communication, which at the time depended upon amplitude modulation radio signals am back in nine in an official capacity, but a year earlier, a young boy who would become incredibly important in the development of multiple wireless technologies first became fascinated with radio. That boy's name

was al Gross. He was nine years old in nineteen seven, and he was on a steamship traveling across the Great Lakes, and he got to tour the ship and he got up to the radio room and he thought it was absolutely fascinating. He could hear the wireless being operated on there. And the operator brought Al Gross into the room and explained what the equipment was and and Gross was completely

blown away. Eleven years later, Al Gross develops a prototype of a two way radio communications device, and Gross gave the gadget an interesting name. He called it the Walkey Talkie.

His invention brought him to the attention of the United States Office of Strategic Services, which would eventually evolve into the Central Intelligence Agency, and Gross was recruited to develop this technology for military use, specifically creating a way for covert communication between aircraft and troops while the troops were

behind enemy lines during World War Two. After the war, Gross built his own business called Gross Electronics Incorporated and filed a dozen patents relating to wireless communication, a lot of which would end up being really important over the following decades, including one that described the circuitry needed for a personal paging system. And this would be in nineteen nine. A year earlier, by the way, he had actually pioneered citizens band radio or CB radio, So you radio fans

out there should really raise a glass to Mr Al Gross. Now. Gross's breakthrough in nineteen nine was adapting his walkie talkie technology for cordless remote telephonic signaling, and essentially his system used radios to alert doctors for specific messages. Hospitals have been relying on intercom systems with speakers wired up throughout the building. You might be familiar with the classic line paging Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard. If you are be sure to shout out to me what that's from,

because I'm always happy to meet another cultured individual. The intercom system was a bit intrusive, and it meant that doctors frequently had to listen for messages that they really didn't need to worry about because it wasn't for them. Gross's solution was these pages. The they weren't called pagers yet. The gadgets had what M i T calls discriminating circuitry, which just means the circuits could detect a specific signal so that the owner of the pager would only get

alerts intended for that person. And that's an important distinction. A commercial radio is just a dumb receiver, so you can tune it to a specific band of frequencies, but you're getting the same signal as everyone else that's also tuned to that band. If you want to send a message to a specific person, you need to have some way to indicate to that person's radio device that there's a personal message for them and have that device ignore anything that wasn't intended for its owner. So how does

it do that? Well, we'll cover it in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, So how do you make sure a pager knows which signal is meant or hit? Well. One way to do that is to create a system in which every pager unit within a service has a specific set of audio tones associated with it. Early pages used a two tone system. Typically you describe them as an A tone and a

B tone. And these tones would be anywhere from three hurts to three thousand hurts, and frequency which is within the range of human hearing, which averages out to hurt hurts, although you start to lose those higher ranges as you get older. The two tones would also last a specific amount of time each, and the combination of the tone's frequency and duration would be enough to create unique call

signs for each pager. The approach did have some limitations, however, Namely, it limited how many pages could be connected to a single system. Early pages topped out at fewer than a thousand units per systems, somewhere in the realm of eight hundred and fifty or so, which works fine. If the pages are meant for a specific place like a hospital or even a restaurant, you're never going to need more than that. But if you wanted a general consumer pager,

that was not going to cut it. You max out your customer base if fewer than one thousand, and if you wanted to grow, you'd have to implement news systems and administer them all at the same time using different

radio frequencies. It would just become a nightmare. Later, pager manufacturers would switch to a five six tone system, which meant that the identification code would consist of either five or six audio tones that increase the potential number of pages on the single system dramatically to more than a hundred thousand up to a million. As for the messages, those also varied. The early pagers were really just one way radios, similar to what Detroit had been using decades earlier.

Al Gross's invention was meant for doctors to wear in their clothing. An operator would work a central switchboard and when a request would come in for a specific doctor, the operator would activate the circuit for that doctors specific pager frequency. Though it's send a signal that the doctor's pager would pick up, and the pager would make some sort of audible alert also known as a noise to let the doctor know, Hey, you need to listen to me.

The doctor would hold up the pag or to their ear and listen as a voice clear as a day, if a day were you know, a little fuzzy, with some feedback, and it would say something like dr fine, please report to the ICU. The technology didn't really catch

on outside of a few narrow uses. The Jewish Hospital in New York City saw the value, but according to al Gross, he encountered a lot of reluctance among other doctors who seemed to hate the idea, and they didn't really care for the fact that someone could get ahold of them at any time, like when they're playing golf, for example. That was al Gross's joke, by the way,

not mine. And so while his idea was demonstrably useful, it was still ahead of its time, and he he couldn't get any of the big electronics companies really interested in it at first either. But in ninety a company called to L answer Phone. Yeah, that's a fun one to read off and then say, wait, how do I say this out loud? To L answer Phone operate a paging service for doctors in New York. It was not automated, generally speaking. The way the paging service worked was that

you would call a number. Let's say it's a patient and a doctor, because it was almost exclusively used by doctors. A patient calls a doctor's number, the doctor fails to pick up the phone. The call, after a certain number of rings, relays to a messaging service where a human being listens to the message takes it down for the doctor. If the call is urgent. The messaging service then makes a note that this needs to be broadcast to the doctor's pager using a three digit code number unique to

that doctor. Once an hour, the doctor is expected to turn on their receiver and listen into a series of three digit codes. If the doctor's own code is among them, the doctor is to call into the messaging service to find out what's going on, and once the doctor checks in, the messaging service removes the doctor's code from the broadcast. So this pager did not alert you when you got a new message. Instead, you actually had to turn it on actively and listen in to find out if you

had any messages. The codes themselves were recorded on sixteen millimeter film, and that film was then encased in plastic sticks which could be hung on a looped belt of a transmitting machine. So this belt would just rotate through and these little plastic sticks with film in them would get scanned by a reader and that would pick up what the code was for that particular piece of film. It would then broadcast that information out uh in its

actual broadcast. That broadcast gets repeated every single minute for an hour. After a doctor called in, you would just remove that doctor's stick from the belt and it would then remove that three digit number from the broadcast, which seems pretty wild to me. It's kind of an interesting concept. Doctors would actually pay to be included on this service.

It cost about twelve dollars a month back in the nineteen fifties, and the range on the broadcast tower was twenty five miles twenty five mile radius around the tower. Oh and we still weren't calling them pagers, even though they worked on what was referred to as a paging service. So they called the service a paging one. But the devices we're still just kind of radios. They weren't called pagers.

It wasn't until a decade after Gross's attempts, so we're talking nineteen fifty nine, that we finally get the word pager. That word was coined by a little company called Motorola. The original Motorola pager was a personal radio communications device. It could transmit radio messages to pager owners. This one got a bit more traction than Gross's approach. Also, by this time, some of the patents Gross had filed were expiring.

Now that's what happens with patents. When you file a patent, you have exclusive rights to that particular implementation of ideas for the duration of the patent. In return, you submit documentation describing those ideas, and that documentation is publicly available

through the patent office. So if anyone wants to use your implementation, they can see how you did it, more or less, but they're supposed to come to you and negotiate a license or otherwise purchased the Latin or they can just bide their time and wait until the patent has expired, and then they can use that same implementation, because at that point it's a fair game, which is more or less what Motorola was able to do, and

it wasn't necessarily malicious. Gross's ideas were great, but the world just wasn't really ready for it yet, and the technology Gross used was a bit bulkier than the tech available a decade later. Motorola's approach, well very similar to Grosses, was more practical by ninety nine. Even so, the pagers Motorola offered weren't exactly like the ones we'd see later on, it did evolve over time. In nineteen sixty an inventor named John Francis Mitchell developed the first pager of this style,

to use transistors. See earlier pages were actually using vacuum tubes, which made the pages larger, heavier, and it meant they could heat up if they were used a lot, although the nature of pages meant that that rarely ever happened. Mitchell was able to make a pager using transistors instead of vacuum tubes, and he was a chief engineer a motor Ela and would eventually rise to the rank of

president and CEO of the company. He'd also play an instrumental part in developing the technology that made cell phones possible. Bell System the Telephone company offered a paging service as early as nineteen sixty two using a gadget they called the bell Boy, which is just so adorable. It contained three receivers. Each receiver was tuned to a different frequency, so the pager would only activate if all three receivers

picked up a signal simultaneously. You had to send three signals of those three frequencies for the pager to react. This would also cause the Bellboy to make a noise, which would alert the owner to a call that they needed to call into a central messaging service in order to get their relevant message. So again, I didn't tell you what the message was, but rather that you had received a message and you needed to call into your answering service to find out what that was. In nineteen

sixty four, Motorola introduced the page boy. Now, originally this was a tone pager, which meant it would only send a tone to the targeted device, and the tone would indicate whatever your specific course of action should be, such as call the home office or get your took us to the emergency room as soon as possible. Within a couple of years, Motorola began offering tone and voice page boys,

which could play either a tone or an actual voice message. Now, clearly voice messages can relay more information than just when you hear this noise, do this thing. But in any case, these technologies all involved broadcasting a message out into the environment.

And when the Motoroles moved to make Pages a consumer product, the man explained to customers, Okay, this product works, but only if you live with an X number of miles of this broadcast tower, because the alternative meant broadcasting the same message across numerous towers, because you never know where you're intended recipient might be. The pages in those days were all one way receivers, so again they gave no

information back to their system. There was no nationwide paging system set up yet, so they're all local area, one way communication devices. Now, this makes it a great time to address a cliche about pagers that was prevalent in the eighties and nineties and up to today really, and that was that the only people who carried pages around

were doctors and drug dealers. Why drug dealers because they could get a message from someone who wanted to buy drugs, but the drug dealer would never be tracked because pages are just dumb receivers. They couldn't reveal information about the drug dealers whereabouts. I gave the dealer the ability to receive messages, decide which ones to respond to, and keep

everything below the radar. But these messages also for the most part, were unencrypted, which meant was possible to intercept these messages and hear them unencrypted and understand exactly what was being sent to them. So you also had to be sneaky about you know what the messages content actually was. Now I also need to point out that eventually there would be two way pagers on the market, and those products allow for communication to flow in both directions from

the system to the pager and vice versa. Now, under that kind of system, you definitely could track a person's general location, at least based off which receiving tower was picking up the pagers responses. But that was different and those wouldn't come into play until the mid nineteen nineties. Now I've got a lot more to talk about with pagers. We've got some stuff to chat about as far as protocols go and the different numeric and alpha numeric approaches

to paging. But before I jump into that next section, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Well. Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, and by nineteen eighty, we're looking at about three point two million pagers deployed out in the real world. That's globally, and these were all limited range pagers, meaning you still had to be within the broadcast range of a specific service to get

your notifications. Now, if that service went across a couple of cities, you might be able to get your notification if you went from one city to the other, but most cases it meant that you really couldn't travel very far away and still get notified. So outside of the effective range of the broadcast tower. The pages just a

hunk of circuits and plastic. It was only when wide aid area paging came about, which allowed messages to be broadcast via radio across large areas, probably getting from city to city and even across countries, that they became a big consumer product that they began to Once they started creating these wide area networks using very high frequencies instead of lower frequencies in order to send these signals out, those would travel much further, which means you don't need

as many towers to have your message go out across a wide area. Um. They also tend to travel better through buildings, which cell phone service doesn't necessarily do that. Um. When I talk about who's using pages today, we'll chat a little bit more about that. So around the same time in the early engineers created the protocols that would allow paging systems to transmit numeric data to pagers, which

meant pages needed something new. They needed a display, because before it was just a radio, right or just something that made noise. In some cases it would just beap. In fact, that's why we call them beepers. The original page boy had this very uh distinct beeping sound, and people started calling them beepers. Using low power and LCD screens, you could give them an actual display and the pages

could show a sequence of numbers. Those numbers could be a phone number, so you could get a message saying that just gives you a phone number that you're supposed to call, or it may be a series of digits that represent a specific action. So for example, one to three might mean call headquarters to receive a message, or you might have another code that tells you this is an emergency code. You need to get back to the hospital. There's a surgery that's waiting for you, that kind of thing.

So there's another feature that doctors relied upon because it's sped up communication considerably and gave clear instructions regarding where a doctor should go went on call. This is also the time that paging systems began to create interfaces that allowed you to page someone by placing a call to a page number. Using the telephone system. Before that, you would have to just call a service, or you would have to wait till US answering service answered your call

before and they would send the message onto the paging system. Now, the paging systems were starting to get integrated directly into the telephone system, so you could have an interface from your phone to the paging system. A few years later, when we get into the mid nineteen eighties, new protocols and displays allowed for alpha numeric messages. Now you can actually send words to someone, not just a series of numbers. Now.

This necessitated the development of some protocols required to transmit data to pager systems, and there are a few of them. In Europe, the dominant protocol was called poc SAG poc s a G now that was an acronym that stood for Post Office Code Standardization Advisory Group. In the United States, the dominant protocol was once again from Motorola and it was called FLEX. These were the sets of rules that made it possible to administer a large system of one

way radio receivers. Poc SAG and FLEX worked in slightly different ways. With poc SAG, a system would send out two messages to relay information to a specific pager. The first message was a wake up message, and that would bring pages out of a sleep mode. The wake up message says I've got a broadcast coming, so you better be ready, and the pages would switch from sleep mode

to active. The sleep mode helped conserve battery life. After waking up, the pager would wait for a second message that would contain data meant not just for that single pager, and the data arrived in blocks called frames, so the pager would seek out the information within those frames that pertained specifically to the pager itself and extract that information from the entire frame and give it to user. Flex, on the other hand, relied on pagers scanning for unretreated

messages at predetermined intervals. So, in other words, a FLEX pager would follow an instruction such as every fifteen minutes checked for unretrieved messages by doing a scan on the antenna. Motorola's logic for the following this approach was two fold. It kept air waves less cluttered, and it would also help conserve battery life in the long run. Later, Motorola would introduce a new protocol called Reflex, which wasn't just

a great Duran Durant song and pagers. Reflex was a protocol that allowed for two way paging systems, meaning you could use your pager to reply to messages. This turned pagers into effectively text messengers. Sort of a precursor to sell and smartphones. One of the earliest two way consumer pagers was the Tango, once again created by Motorola. It could receive text messages and short emails, but your responses

were limited to a few sta entered options. You only had like four buttons to use, so you couldn't type in stuff, but you could select from some standard responses if you weren't next to a phone and couldn't call the person immediately. This particular device hit the market in the mid nineteen nineties, and in Research in Motion a k A Rim a k a. BlackBerry created a device

called the inter at Active. Pager's interactive with the AT symbol right in the middle there, and it's sported its own full Quarty keyboard and let you respond to messages with your own customized responses. Another protocol developed around this time was the Telelocator Alpha Numeric Protocol or TAP, which was originally known as the Motorola Page Entry or PET protocol. This one created an industry standard for sending alpha numeric

messages to pagers. It lets you send an alpha numeric message to a pager service, which then would forward that message onto pagers themselves and later to mobile phones. Now these days, pages rely on very high frequency transmissions, like I said, which can go great distances, so that cuts

down those transmitters. So if you're going to be in a horror movie, and I don't mean go to a horror movie, I mean if you're going to be in a horror movie, make sure you have a pager with you, because chances are something's gonna happen that makes your cell phone not work, But pagers might still work because those signals travel further, and often you can end up getting a page even if a cell phone signal can't get through. This is the reason why certain people still carry pages,

because they're more reliable in those kind of situations. So you could get a very valuable piece of information while you're in that horror movie, something like don't go in that door, and then you don't go in that door and you and you get to be one of the ones that lives. There is a downside though, one way pagers, like I said, they don't send any information back to the system, which means you never know if your message actually got to the pager you were sending it to

unless someone calls and responds to it. So if I send out a message to your pager, I don't get a notification if it got to you or not, because it's a one way communication. The radio wave goes out, but it doesn't come back. So unless you call me, I don't know for sure that you got the message. My only real recourse is to send the page again and again. And in fact, this was often a piece

of information people who owned pagers would tell people. They said, listen, if you page me and you don't hear from me within like a minute, go ahead and page me again, because chances are I might have been in a spot where I was just outside of range, or maybe I had turned off my pager for a second. But if I haven't called you back within a minute, go ahead

and try again, and do it again and again and again. Ah, which could get really irritating of a lee if you just don't want to answer a page, But it was also necessary because there was no way to be sure that your message was getting through. So go ahead and be obnoxious, is what I'm saying now. Over time, the consumer pager space began to diminish, which is not a big shock because cell phones largely made most use cases

for pagers moot, at least for your average person. By two thousand one, Motorola was actually getting out of the game. They had been the dominant player in paging services since the nineteen seventies. Eventually, a new company called us A Mobility, formed out of a merger between two other companies, Metro

Call Holdings and Arch Wireless. Us A Mobility began to take over the paging landscape in the United States, eventually merging with another company called am Com Software and then transforming into a new entity called Spock s p o K. Spot continues to create pages, including models that allow for encrypted paging services, which is a pretty big shift from earlier technologies which were unencrypted and thus a potential liability.

You may have even heard about that that you don't send that that sensitive information via paging because of that, And while you don't see them out and about nearly as much these days, lots of people still use pagers. Doctors and first responders often have them, as they are reliable and they're efficient for specific types of data relays. But it's pretty clear that the SMS protocols cell phones

smartphones have largely replaced much of our pager needs. Unless we're in these narrow use cases, unless you're waiting at a restaurant, many of those still use simple pages to alert people when the table is ready. You get that little coaster that lights up as a paging system. So these days I find more and more people are using phone numbers to send text messages or even a quick phone call to alert people to a ready table. So even this is a fading use, I would say, of

the paging system. Oh and by the way, if you want to know how some of these pages actually vibrate or self ohones or smartphones or game controllers, the answer is actually pretty simple. Inside the device, you have a direct current motor and it has a spindle that it can turn. The spindle rotates that are pretty high speed, but attached to the spindle is an off center weight, so the spindle has always weighted heavier to one side

versus the other. So as it spends, that weight creates the vibration as the momentum shifts inside the device at high speeds. Just like you should know. And that is generally speaking, hell pagers work and how they evolved over time. It's an interesting story to kind of look back on. It's Also, I think interesting to note that out Gross

never really became rich off his ideas. His ideas would be the foundation not just for pagers, but also for cell phone at technologies and other wireless technologies, but he wasn't really able to capitalize on them while the patents were still in effect. It was only after the patents had expired the Motorola kind of stepped in and started doing all of that work. However, al Gross never got

angry or bitter about this. He was genuinely happy to see the technology come to pass, and he said that if in the end of the day he had made a positive impact through his ideas, that was what was important to him, which I think is pretty cool. He passed away a few years ago, actually at the two thousand one, I believe, so, uh, just taking a moment to acknowledge the brilliance of an inventor, someone who was really eager to make a positive difference in the world.

We need more people of that. ILK. If you guys have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes, or maybe there's a guest I should have on the show, or someone you would like to have as a temporary co host. Someone just sits in on a couple of episodes. Let me know, send me a message. The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle at both of those tech stuff hs W. If you want to watch live, go to twitch dot

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