The Walkie-Talkie: more than just a child’s toy

From their inception, these lifesaving two-way transceivers were always far more than a mere plaything for kids

THE BABY TALK NAME may suggest something for you to do with a tiny tot or what chatty dog owners engage in when out strolling with their pets, but during World War Two the walkie-talkie could often mean the difference between life and death.

Who exactly invented the hand-held communication device – the Canadians or Americans traditionally joust for the title – is a matter of debate that largely depends on which side of the border one hails from, but the evidence seems to favour self-taught Canadian electronics wizard Donald Hings.

Hings was born in Leicester in 1907, moved to Canada with his mother at the age of three and left school early to help support her. By 1937 he was working for the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company (Cominco) in Trail, British Columbia, designing geophysics equipment. Don was asked to build a two-way voice transceiver so that the company could communicate with its pilots over Canada’s Northwest Territories and prospectors in the field without using clumsy Morse code

Hings came up with a compact, batterypowered, two-way radio that weighed around 5lb and could be held in one hand while talking. He called his invention a ‘Packset’ and it gained little attention outside the mining community at the time.

However, in 1939 he nipped across the border to Spokane, Washington State, to take out a US Patent on what turned out to be the day that Canada declared war on Germany. The potential of the Packset for military use was immediately apparent and Hings was seconded to Canada’s National Research Council for the duration of the war to assist in developing his device for use by the military, for which he was awarded an MBE in 1946. During a demo of the Packset, a Toronto journalist heard the soldier say ‘You can walk with it while you talk with it’ and duly wrote it up in journalese as ‘walkie-talkie’, gaining the Packset a new name.

Around 18,000 were eventually produced for the British and Allied armies and it first went into battle with the Canadians in the disastrous Dieppe raid in August 1942.

Meanwhile, the US War Department had in 1940 contacted the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, of Illinois, to develop a portable battery-powered two-way FM radio. (The Galvin Corp had introduced the first commercially produced car radio in 1930, called Motorola, which was eventually adopted as the company name.)

The Galvin device, the SCR-300, was a very long way from being hand-held, requiring a ‘grunt’ to function as a mobile radio station lugging a 38lb (17kg) box on his back (15lb of which was attributed to the batteries) and usually tethered to an officer using the cableconnected handset.

The War Department’s technical department handbook somewhat optimistically described the SCR-300, of which 50,000 were manufactured, as ‘a walkie-talkie intended for foot combat troops’. Walkie while talkie, although possible, was not that easy.

The SCR-300 made its combat debut in the invasion of southern Italy in August 1943 and was deemed so important that the production sets were delivered directly from the US to the staging areas by air rather than by sea.

In parallel, Galvin also produced the SCR536 Handie-Talkie. Weighing roughly the same as the Hings device but ergonomically more streamlined, it could also be held and operated in one hand, though its limited range of up to a mile meant that it didn’t live up to expectations. It still proved its worth on the battlefield, however, and 130,000 were produced.

Walkie-talkies undoubtedly saved the lives of thousands of troops, but they also cost the lives of far too many operators, as the long antenna swaying above their heads made them prime targets for snipers. Those brought up on World War Two action movies will almost certainly visualise the SCR-536 when they hear the term walkie-talkie.

As a walkie-talkie can’t receive and transmit at the same time, it requires a switch or button to allow a rapid change from receive to transmit, requiring each communication to end with the word ‘over’. One can only speculate on how many millions of times that word has been beamed over the airwaves.

Here’s one more. Over… and out.

‘THOSE BROUGHT UP ON WW2 MOVIES WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY VISUALISE THE SCR-536 WHEN THEY HEAR THE TERM WALKIE-TALKIE’