He attended the Erzherzog-Rainer-Realgymnasium, since renamed the Sigmund Freud Gymnasium [de] in honour of its most famous pupil, and matriculated with distinction in 1917.
[3] He joined the university research staff in 1922, receiving the highest teaching qualification, Venia legendi in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry in 1930.
[4] Following the Anschluss in 1938, more than 2,700 mostly Jewish affiliates of the University of Vienna - lecturers, students and administration employees - were dismissed and subsequently forced to emigrate or were murdered.
[8] In late 1939 Gross was interned as an enemy alien in the Isle of Man [9] He was one of eight internees from the physics department of Bristol University.
He wrote to George Thomson, chairman of the MAUD Committee 'a spanner is thrown in the works if all these friendly aliens are excluded'.
[4][11] In 1945 Colonel Wallace Devereux founded Almin Limited (Associated Light Metal Industries) which brought together a group of companies, including Intal, involved with the production and processing of aluminium and magnesium alloys.
[12] He founded a new company, the Fulmer Research Institute, to offer services to Government and industry as Britain's first contract R&D organization and to be Almin's R&D unit.
One consequence of this attitude was that he took particular care in building a team of skilled and expert experimentalists to test his ideas and determine the data he needed.
He concluded: So far as the conception of the process is concerned, the important points are the way Gross saw significance in a chance piece of information which others consistently neglected, how he deduced the existence of AlCl from the most basic of chemical principles, and how he then applied this in an utterly different context.He was married to Maria and had one daughter Mali.