Or, “pocket phones,” as the cartoon, which was published some time between 1919 and 1923, calls them. It’s eerily predictive of the many inconveniences we face in our modern world.
They really nailed that prediction.
It’s funny because when cell phones first came out I was at a wedding where the Priest made everybody turn theirs off. We snuck one onto one of the chairs lining the alter and called the Groom during vows.
Pretty much as soon as the telephone became common cartoonists and other humorists started imagining all the ways that the telephone would interrupt lives and ring at awkward moments.
As the article says, predictions of portable phones had been around for decades. The first hit I get on “pocket telephone” is from the March 2, 1877 New York Tribune. But an even better example is from the June 23, 1877 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The idea of catching an interviewer under your back window, with a new fangled little pocket telephone at work, is one of the apprehensions which make life dreary.
The first hit I get for an actual pocket telephone - maybe real, maybe not - is in the Jan. 26, 1878 [Yuma] Arizona Sentinel, which talks about Philip Reade’s improved model, implying there had been earlier ones.
It’s really amazing how much farther back this stuff goes than anyone thinks possible today. And none of it was from science fiction.
Another early example was an editorial comment titled “A Triumph, but Still a Terror” in the December 17, 1906 New York Times , which asked “How will it be when we’re told, not that somebody’s ‘on the wire,’ but that somebody’s ‘on the air,’ and we are exposed to answer calls from any part of the atmosphere?”
There’s a prediction I read years ago, written before the First World War, that was discussing ubiquitous always-on wireless communication, and it said something like, “…and the user may call his friend, and wherever the friend may be, in a far city, or in the Amazon jungle, or at the bottom of the sea, the friend will hear the signal and respond. Or it may be that there is no response, the waves are silent, and the user will then know that his friend is dead.”
This was an 1897 prediction by William Ayrton, which was related on page 820 of the June 29, 1901 Electrical Review:
Syntonic Wireless Telegraphy.
After the reading of Mr. Marconi’s paper, which was published in full in the ELECTRICAL REVIEW for June 15 and 22, before the Society of Arts, in London, Professor W. E. Ayrton being in the chair, the following discussion took place…
The chairman: Although still far away, he thought they were gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy he had ventured to make four years before, of a time when if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a loud, electromagnetic voice, heard by him who had the electromagnetic ear, silent to him who had it not. “Where are you?” he would say. A small reply would come, “I am at the bottom of a coal mine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Pacific.” Or, perhaps, in spite of all the calling, no reply would come, and the person would then know that his friend was dead. Let them think of what that meant, of the calling which went on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole; not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wanted to hear and absolutely silent to him who did not, it was almost like dreamland and ghostland, not the ghostland of the heated imagination cultivated by the Psychical Society, but a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws. On seeing the young faces of so many present he was filled with green envy that they, and not he, might very likely live to see the fulfillment of his prophecy.
(A year later, The Electrician noted: “it is by no means a safe assumption that a man is dead because he does not answer our call. Peradventure he sleepeth, or is on a journey; but more likely the exchange is not attentive.”)
There are people under the illusion that Heinlein predicted the cell phone because he put a wireless communication device in the hands of teenagers and called it a phone. That was in one of his juveniles, written 1952 or thereabouts. Way too late.
Or too early, since the essential tech of cell phones is the cell network, not the phones. I don’t think anyone described the network before it was invented. (Not counting the engineers who did it, of course.)
Another juvenile example, from The Radio Girls of Roselawn by Margaret Penrose (1922):
“I know,” declared Jessie with conviction. “I’ll tell Darry to put in a regular sending set–like the one I hope to have, if father will let me. And we can have our two sets tuned so that we can hear each other speak.”
“My goodness! You don’t mean it is as easy as all that?” cried Amy.
“Didn’t you read that magazine article?” demanded her chum. “And didn’t the man say that, pretty soon, we could carry receiving and sending sets in our pockets–maybe–and stop right on the street and send or receive any news we wanted to?”
That’s the one! But I’d never read the full version.
I think that sounds more like a walkie-talkie.
I’m going to start referring to mine as my pocket phone.
mmm
Wasn’t wireless.
Signal Officer Reade was a fairly significant figure:
That’s hilarious. I’m sure the bride and groom congratulated you on this witty and not-at-all-inappropriate prank.
There’s a scene in the 1978 film The Big Fix (about an hour and a minute into the film) where the main character is in a club where the members are rich men. At one point he’s handed a box in which there is a telephone that looks like a regular landline telephone. He notices that there is no wires connecting this box to anything. He’s astonished that it’s possible to use it like a regular telephone. Apparently there is some sort of connection by radio waves to the regular telephone lines in the club. So as early as 1978 it was possible to have telephones that were portable within a short distance at least from a connection to the regular telephone system, but they were apparently very expensive and most people didn’t even know about their existence.
You mean like the one they were using in the Space Needle restaurant as far back as 1962?
Prior to cellular phones, car phones (which used radio signals to connect to the telephone network) were a thing, as far back as the 1940s. The systems were bulky and expensive, but they were definitely around.
It was a collective “we”. I can’t take credit for it. It was back when cell phones were a novelty that could fit in your pocket and I couldn’t afford one. And yes, the single ring got a laugh from all. Except the Priest.
The groom in the wedding once stopped by my house to pick me up along with that same band of friends and he called my land line when he pulled up. To understand how early that was in the evolution of cell phones I was seriously surprised by it. It was such a unique thing to do at the time. A young person today would not be able to understand the novelty of that.
I’m just amazed at how accurate the cartoon predictions were.
Here’s a 120yo+ prediction of electrical scooters, pretty accurate.
https://old.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/vun6gj/electric_scooter_from_1898_published_in_the_car/
Join us! (It’s not all predictions that came to be true)
https://old.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/
In the ham radio world (and others before that), this is/was called an autopatch. I’ve also heard it on Federal Gov channels. It’s pretty well extinct today.
Yeah, when I call someone on their cell phone and they don’t answer, I always assume it must mean they’re dead.