Alfred H. Grebe
Radio pioneer
Alfred Henry Grebe, Sr. ( GREE-bee; 1895–October 24, 1935) was a pioneer in the radio broadcasting field.
Early life
Grebe was born in 1895 in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens, New York City, to Henry Greb, a horticulturist, and Anna Marie Krick Grebe. At age 12, two years after his father's death in 1905, Grebe began to make his own radios. He converted a greenhouse into a radio shack, where he and other boys also interested in radio met.
Education and career
Following his graduation from P.S. 88 in Jamaica, Grebe attended the Jamaica Training School and took courses at the Marconi Radio Institute in Manhattan. At age 15, he obtained a license as a commercial operator and was hired by the United Wireless Telegraph Company as a ship's radio operator. After United Wireless went bankrupt in 1912, Grebe began working for Telefunken and spent three years onboard the British tramp tanker Saranac, traveling as far as India. He returned to Sayville, Long Island, where he worked as an operator at the first commercial station on the island.
During the radio craze of the time, Grebe's friends asked him to make receivers for them.
The public source identifies “Alfred H. Grebe” as radio pioneer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Alfred, Grebe and Radio.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4722766. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1935, 1905 and 1912.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alfred H. Grebe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.