There have been many predictions about the year 2001 and the technology forecast in the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is ironic that the man who was responsible for many of the sci-fi ideas, failed by a couple of days to see the year in.
Canadian-born Al Gross, the inventor of the walkie-talkie and considered the father of cordless communications, died in the US just before Christmas.
He devised the first cellular system during the war. His box of tricks was installed in RAF Mosquito light bombers which then circled over individual sections of occupied France picking up low-powered transmissions from agents in the area below.
This became the technology base of mobile phones and then pagers, the latter when Gross was in hospital and got fed up with being disturbed by the constant stream of public address announcements.
Only when his work was declassified in the mid-1970s did it lead to the cellular explosion, but by then he had sold many of the patents to Motorola.
