As far as I know most people 10-15-20 years ago thought that maybe tradesmen and business executives would want a mobile phone, but no-one else would.
Were there any phone company executives that predicted that everyone in the world would have or want one ? Or were there any investors who put $5000 in shares on a mobile phone company and are now millionaires ?
I worked for a telecom recently ( for a short time ) and the bosses still could not believe how much money they were making out of mobile phone use.
Certainly I think people figured that the well-to-do and techno-geeks would have them in their cars, but the idea of using a telephone- much less a cellular/mobile one- for anything except, y’know, actually ringing people up and talking to them was still pretty alien to most people until about 10 years ago, AFAIK.
Of course, now they’re more like miniature computers and PDAs that let you talk to people as well, but I’m sitting here looking at my 3G videophone and realising I don’t use it for anything except text messages and ringing people…
Just recently I picked up my old copy of Robert Heinlein’s early 1950s juvenile sf opus Space Cadet. Right at the start is a dialogue that gors something like this:
Cadet #1:Your phone is ringing
Cadet #2: Thanks. (Pulls phone out of his pocket, answers it.)
Cadet #1: I packed my phone in my bag so I don’t get calls on the road like that.
If my daughter read this, she wouldn’t see anything amazing about this – it’s the way people act and talk today about their phones. Looking back, it’s not hard to predict this kind of thing, but I don’t know anyone besides Heinlein who pulled it off so easily and apparently effortlessly. A lot of his off-the-cuff “Futurisms” like this have come to pass, including heatr- or motion-sensitive light switches (thatr turn the lights on when you enter a room and off when you leave), and cord-free telephones (in Operation Moonbase he shows telephone handsetys with little antennae on them and the cradling deskset with a matching antenna, but no cord between. at no time does any character mention this – it’s part of the assumed background).
So, yeah, there were some people who were considering the future with a good knowledge of human preferences and behavior who anticipated this sort of thing.
It was pretty common in the general culture. Even as the trend was emerging, there were constant references to the connumicators on Dick Tracy and Star Trek. The appeal was fairly obvious to everyone, but most people simply never believed cell phones would would be so cheap, so small, so reliable with such universal coverage. (Even as late as the 1980s
Many people also believd “no one would want one”, but with the obvious benefits that was simply reactionary conservatism.I got my first telephone answering machine in 1980. At the time, they were common for businesses, but rare in homes. A LOT of people indignantly asked me why I would want such a thing – including the ones who squalled the louded if I forgot to turn it on when I went out. The benefits were obvious, even to them, but they refused to see it. Some of the (stenuous!) arguments they made seem very odd today – and in about 10 years, pretty much every one of them had one, too.
That’s not to say that the success of cellphones in the 80s/90s was inevitable (though I believed it would be, in the long run). It’s an infrastructure business, so it’s entirely possible that bad decisions in marketing, management, legistlative standards and other aspects of the business could put a company out of the business. A lot of the early players were forced into reorganization, mergers, or divestitute under not particularly profitable terms. Even if you had every faith in the concept, you still had to pick the right horse at the right time. You might make money, but not necessarily any more than you’d have made in some other business. In fact, despite the cell phone industry’s success, I don’t believe it’s really been the standout industry for investment over the past 25-30 years
Oops, in my first paragraph, I meant to say “(Even in the 80s, as the cell phone boom was clearly beginning, the heavy “brick” units has substantial drawbacks in weight, battery life, range, cell coverage, etc. leading many to doubt that usage would ever become as widespread as quickly as it did. Then again, people once argued that most people would never need telephones at all, and in the 1970s only millionaires had smoke detectors. Both are considered essential safety services now, often offered free to those who can’t afford them.)”
Twenty years ago, that’s true. But at that time, a mobile phone had to be installed in your car, and both the installation and the service were very expensive. The technology had to advance before it could become a mass market item.
I began working in the cellular telephone industry in 1992. Handheld phones had been introduced by that time, although service was still patchy and the phones were cumbersome bricks.
The executives in my division were just beginning to perceive that this would one day be something that everyone would have. However, our cellular division was only a small part of a huge landline telco, and our forecasts showing mass market penetration within 10 years were routinely mocked by other divisions with a vested interest in the (landline) status quo.
The FCC awarded the first cellular telephone licenses in the early 1980’s. One license in each city went to the local landline telco (which is how my telco got involved), and the second was awarded by lottery among any investor who was interested enough to pay a filing fee and file a crude business plan. Typically the lottery winner would sell the license to somebody like McCaw and make a small profit, and then McCaw would develop the business and make a huge profit.
The defining factor in cell phone use between then and now is monthly cost.
I purchased my first cell phone in 1994. It was an analog 800 MHz phone, and my plan included 20 minutes per month for $79.95 per month. Additional minutes were $0.69 per minute, nights (6PM to 6AM) and weekends were free. Long distance was charged if you called outside of your home area.
Now I pay basically the same amount per month and I get 1400 minutes per month shared between 3 phones. Nights (9PM to 6AM) and weekends free, all long distance free, additional minutes $0.29 per minute.
What’s the difference? Analog versus CDMA technology. Let me explain.
Analog cell phones operated basically the same as a radio. If you had a scanner that was modified, you could hear cell calls (this is illegal, BTW). Each channel could carry 1 conversation at a time, and your typical cell site had 10 channels. So 10 conversations could be held simultaneously. The channels had to be allocated with different frequencies on adjoining cells, so there would be no channel overlapping.
CDMA technology is very efficient. (CDMA stands for Code Division Multiple Access) The technology digitizes your voice and sends digital packets on several channels at once, using Spread Spectrum technology. And since all the channels are in use at every cell site (say 40 channels), and each channel can carry up to 60 conversations, that means each cell site can support 2400 simultaneous conversations. See here for a great explanation of the different services.
While I have simplified the above explanations, you can see why cost has gone down. More calls handled means more money in their pockets, and if they can offer the service at an affordable price, more people will jump in and use the product, which translates into more money for the cell companies. The infrastructure has been greatly improved since 1994 when I got my first phone, and I rarely drop a call these days. My LG phone is smaller, lighter, and has many more features than my first Nokia.
My boss in the mid-eighties was all over this, invested directly, and is now fabulously wealthy. He was the VP of Engineering at the computer networking company we worked at. I remember having a conversation with him in my office about where things were heading, and he observed that “we’re not far from a time when we’ll all be wearing tiny little lapel pins that do all of our communications for us - we’ll just talk to them.”
Whoda thunk that people would sit at green lights picking their nose, pull out in front of you after looking right at you, or go 50mph in the fast lane?
I guess the lesson here is to think of the most annoying way people could use technology and that’s how some of them will.
.Dick Tracy beat all of them with a wrist watch phone in the early forties IIRC, and not long afterward with a TV added! The wrist watch radio was actually a bit of sci-fi when first introduced.
I would say that many people in say 1955 could have predicted that Television sets would have become better-colour, better sound,picture even cheaper etc. And people may have predicted better programming with more choice.
But no-one could have predicted that there would be millions around the world paying $100 per month for a 100 channels. I am sure people in 1955 would have said why on Earth pay $100 per month when I have channels for free.
Not relevant for the OP. Dick Tracy is a professional, with a radio for professional use, with which he can communicate with a select number of co-workers. The OP was asking about devices by which any common layman can communicate with the masses for personal purposes.
Heck, they knew it by the late 1930s. You can find magazine articles from the 1940s telling about the great coming age of color TV. Disney made a lot of his early TV showes in color, even though there wasn’t a market at the time, so he could broadcast them later in color.
Early predictions of TV , even in science fiction, were off, though, it’s true. A lot of people saw TV as a means of two-way communication, even after radio became big. Even then some people got it very wrong – Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore wrote of people going to see TV in large movie theater-like places in The Proud Robot. (Although my local cinema does show hi-def Red Sox games during the summer, so it’s not completely wrong.)
O the other hand, H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and especially Murray Leinstein (in “A Logic Named Joe”) were remarkably prescient about the Internet. Leinster (also circa 1948) had kids downloading porn from it.
Initally yes but the portable technology was out there well before that. In 1981 in one of my first jobs after college I was a Radio Shack trainee on Wisconsin Ave in Bethesda Maryland, and being reasonably bright and talkative, some of the customers took a shine to me. One day two middle aged men in business suits were buying batteries, and were also asking about cordless telephones. We chatted a bit, and before they left one of the men asked me if I’d like to see something interesting and pulled out a portable, but fully operational Motorola brick phone from his overcoat, and made a call. It was like he pulled out a laser gun and zapped something in terms of how new and different it was.
I don’t know how high up on the Motorola food chain her was to have that hardware, but it’s safe to say he probably had some clout as we didn’t start selling bag car phones for at least another year or so after that and the handhelds (like he had) were a bit after that.
I have a section, Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-1922), on my website that has information on some very early ideas on this subject. Also, a 1922 humor article, A Wireless Warning, envisioned employees being required to wear pagers equipped with prods, so that “About once in so often his employer will push a switch, and the hired man will leap from his recumbent position in the shade and hear a stern voice commanding him to get to work.”
Then again, video phones are something that has been predicted time and time again as an idea whose time should have come yet even now they’re still not in widespread use. I wonder if it’s because of the camera/screen disparity issue (when you talk to someone, it looks like they’re talking at your chin) or because of technological limitations with an analog network or because people just dont like video phones.
There’s also the fact that because hardly anyone has a videophone, there’s no incentive to get one (The problem I have- I’ve got a videophone, but I don’t know anyone else with one, so I never use the video function!), and then there’s the fact you don’t always want people to see what you’re doing when you’re on the phone- say, if you’re trying to tell the boss you’re sick when you’re actually at the beach…