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Donald Hings

Invented Walkie-Talkie

(November 6, 1907—February 25, 2004)

Donald Hings was a self-taught electronics wizard whose modified two-way radio saved the lives of untold Allied soldiers in the Second World War.

Hings was credited as inventor of the walkie-talkie, although he himself never claimed the title. By nature a modest man, he preferred to describe his contribution as belonging to a natural evolution of advancements in the burgeoning electronics field.

Others were not as reticent to take credit. Motorola unveiled a portable radio in the early 1930s, although it needed to run off a motorcycle battery and only transmitted in Morse code. Some sources cite a team of US Army technicians at Monmouth, NJ. Toronto-born Al Gross claimed to have invented the two-way portable radio in 1938, although by then Hings’s own radio was already in production.

An inveterate tinkerer, Hings was hired by Consolidated Mining & Smelting Company (now Teck Cominco). The company’s geologists sought mineral deposits in isolated bush country, yet lacked a means of contacting civilization.

After much trial and error, in 1937 Hings developed a portable two-way voice radio for emergency transmissions. The radio was cased in a watertight container painted a bright yellow for quick recovery should a float plane sink. The radio was a marvel for bush pilots.

Further advancements came quickly, as such innovations as a speech scrambler, a noise filter, a voice magnifier and improved earphones made the technology ever more useful on battlefields. The Canadian military put his models through rigorous testing, including throwing a set over the edge of a seaside cliff. “By the time the army got through with them,” Hings once said, “they had to be built like tanks.”

The walkie-talkies designed by Hings and made available to Canadian and British troops in the Second World War were lighter, more durable and more powerful than any issued by friend or foe. For all his life, Hings would receive testimonials about the quality of his invention from grateful veterans.

The son of a decorated Boer War veteran who became a grower of fruit trees, Donald Lewes Hings was born at Leicester, England. His parents soon became estranged and the boy moved with his mother to Canada at age three. He was educated at grade schools in Lethbridge, Alberta, and North Vancouver, abandoning formal education to help support his mother, a bookkeeper. An inheritance of land brought them to Rossland.

The boy was obsessed by a new marvel of technology—the radio—and built his first crystal set at age fourteen. He helped establish the first radio station in the Kootenays and more than eight decades later would still be listed as a ham radio operator with the call sign VE7BH.

He worked as a labourer at a plywood plant before being hired by the mining company, an employer who indulged his insatiable curiosity.

In 1939, Hings travelled to Spokane, Washington, to file US patents on his portable two-way radio. After an exhausting day of lecturing a patent lawyer on the intricacies of electronics, a tired Hings was returning to his hotel room when interrupted by excited newsboys. Germany had invaded Poland. Canada would be at war within days.

The merits of his device in warfare were clear. After being seconded to the National Research Council, he was invited to Ottawa to demonstrate his equipment. He worked as a civilian with the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals, which would later name him an honorary colonel. The earliest examples were delivered to Britain shortly after the Dieppe Raid of 1942.

Hings called his wireless radio a “Packset.” Motorola had developed what it called a “handie-talkie.” A more familiar name is said to have been coined during a presentation to reporters in Toronto, when a soldier demonstrating the equipment was asked its purpose. “Well,” the soldier said, “you can talk with it while you walk with it.” Apocryphal or not, the device has ever since been known as the walkie-talkie.

A refrigerator factory in Toronto was retooled to manufacture the sets, about eighteen thousand of which were produced during the war. Most were designed for use in the European theatre, with its harsh winters, while others were modified for the tropics or use aboard a tank. The Canadian design was widely felt among the Allies to be the superior equipment. The sets lacked moving parts and were simple to operate, allowing soldiers in the field to share in their comrades’ reconnaissance.

Although stories about two-way radios had appeared in newspapers even after the outbreak of war, the equipment was developed in an atmosphere of secrecy until a decision was made by the brass to unveil the wonder device.

A Toronto newspaper’s headline captured the awe: “Miraculous walkie-talkie like quarterback to army.” The newspaper reported, “To radio men it is a midget miracle, a tiny but tough combined broadcasting and receiving set, easier to operate than a hand-telephone set, light but tough enough for paratroopers to take along in aerial assaults on enemy airfields, versatile enough so, in combination, they become a military network of broadcasting and receiving stations for attacking troops.

“To infantrymen, the walkie-talkie is like giving a football team a quarterback.”

For his service, Hings was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1946.

After the war, he bought a parcel of land atop Capitol Hill in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. The spot, where he had camped as a Boy Scout, afforded an unobstructed view of neighbouring Vancouver and its harbour. Hings built a modest home for himself and his young family, surrounding it with towers, radar sheds, electronic shops and laboratories. Over time, he sold lots to his employees at cost, building a hilltop community of scientists.

His company, Electronic Laboratories of Canada Ltd., of which he was president and chief engineer, won many contracts from the Department of National Defence. Radar and antenna designs found application on the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line across northern Canada.

Hings registered more than fifty patents, including some related to the thermionic vacuum tube and to a Doppler radar aircraft-landing system. Many involved airborne and subsea geomagnetic instruments for exploration of minerals. He even had a patent for an electronic piano.

The compound was a playground for innovative adults and curious children alike. “I thought every kid had a mad scientist as a grandfather,” said Morgan Burke, the daughter of Hings’s youngest daughter.

Hings retired in 1986. Although he had never attended a single university class, he was a member of the American Geophysical Union and the Association of Professional Engineers of BC.

A fall left him an invalid, as doctors feared his weakened heart could not withstand the stress of hip-replacement surgery. A rare excursion from his home came in 2001 when Governor General Adrienne Clarkson invested him as a member of the Order of Canada in a private ceremony in Vancouver.

April 7, 2004