Georges Leclanché, a French engineer, patents in 1866 a cell made of a zinc anode and a manganese dioxide cathode mixed with carbon, immersed in a liquid ammonium chloride solution, achieving almost immediate commercial success in telegraphy applications. Twenty years later, the German physician and scientist Carl Gassner solves the original cell's main practical drawback — the risk of leakage and the need to keep it upright — by immobilizing the liquid electrolyte in a gypsum-gelled paste, giving rise to the first true "dry cell", patented in Germany on April 8, 1886 (and in the USA on November 15, 1887, which has caused some date confusion among sources that cite either 1886 or 1887 interchangeably as the year of the dry cell). Independently, the Japanese inventor Sakizō Yai also develops his own type of dry cell in 1887. The resulting portability of Gassner's dry cell proves decisive for the later popularization of flashlights, portable radios, and, decades later, toys and consumer electronic devices.