[HN Gopher] Bell Telephone launched a mobile phone during the 1940s ___________________________________________________________________ Bell Telephone launched a mobile phone during the 1940s Author : miles Score : 97 points Date : 2023-01-27 20:17 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.openculture.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com) | ghaff wrote: | Not the same thing but even in the early 80s, I would use a | hybrid radio and landline system when I was on drilling rigs. | You'd call the marine operator and they'd patch you through to a | landline. Don't quite remember how it worked the other way. | ytjohn wrote: | On the amateur radio side of the house, we had what we called | phone patches. A radio repeater with a phone connection. | Operating a radio with a touchpad, you would enter a code to | enable the phone patch, then do the dialing. This was in no way | a private call. Anything said on the phone went out over the | open repeater. And even more interesting, any other ham could | join in on your call. But ultimately, most hams would not do so | out of respect. | | While popular in the 80s and 90s, they obviously decreased in | popularity as cell phone usage/coverage increased. | soperj wrote: | Maybe the marine operator would call you, and then they'd patch | you through to the landline? | ghaff wrote: | Just don't remember. Possibly the marine operator radioed and | the radio operator on the rig answered. The company also had | its own radio room but it may have been easier/higher quality | to use the marine operator for outbound than our main radio | room. | | But this was all 40 years ago so fuzzy on the details. | dghughes wrote: | My Dad worked for the Canadian Coast Guard. One time (1980s) | one of the crew got a call from home on ship-to-shore radio. It | was his wife with a non-emergency but she called the ship. The | entire ship turned around and went to port. I forget what it | was for (where is the chequebook, where is the spare house key | etc.?) but it was a huge embarrassment for the guy! | | It must be one-way or something like that since it seemed the | ship had to go in so he must not have been able to call back to | his wife. | MrRadar wrote: | About a month ago the Antique Wireless Museum posted a | presentation about this phone system (MTS) and its successors | (IMTS and AMPS) to their Youtube channel: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRqg8INF9s0 The presentation | includes technical details of how the systems operated. According | to the presentatoin, pricing for the system as of 1946 was $15 | per month plus $0.15 per minute; that's $200 per month and $2.00 | per minute adjusted for inflation. | jimbokun wrote: | When the originating device is a land line, how did the system | know which antenna(s) to route the call to? And how did the | receiving mobile device know the broadcast signal was meant for | that specific mobile phone? | tjohns wrote: | More details: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Telephone_Service | jd3 wrote: | I first watched this video when it was posted to Periscope's | youtube channel 3 years ago. Since then, I've wondered | | 1) why this video is not included in ATTTechChannel's AT&T | Archives[0]? | | 2) why it's in the hands of a private stock footage company? | | Periscope says they saved many of the 16mm military reels in | their collection from the landfill/incinerator in the 40s-70s[1], | but why would Bell have tossed this? Seems bizarre. | | [0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9 | | [1]: https://periscopefilm.com/about-us/ | LastTrain wrote: | I was wondering the same thing, perhaps this was a government | funded project? | lb1lf wrote: | My grandfather was a field engineer with the utility company in | Aalesund, Norway; they got one of the first cellular phones (of | sorts) in the Aalesund area sometime in the early sixties. | | As he recalled it, the phone occupied most of the trunk of the | Ford Anglia they used to get around town. It was a fully manual | affair - they had a calling channel where the operator would say | something like 'Subscriber 11, phone call for you on channel 4' - | subscriber 11 (and anyone else who cared to listen in) would then | turn a dial to channel 4 and get on with their conversation. | After the call ended, they had to manually revert to the calling | channel. | | There only being a handful of subscribers had its perks - once | when he was on his way to lunch with the head of the local branch | of the phone company, when they heard on the phone official's | cellular that a call was incoming for my grandfather. | | He simply answered using the other guy's phone, and the operator | chuckled and said that was OK, she recognised his voice and would | bill the airtime to the utility company's account. | Overtonwindow wrote: | If you found this article interesting, check out the book "the | master switch" by Tim Wu. | | AT&T had an answering machine back in the 40s, but they were | afraid that if anyone found out a phone call could be recorded, | nobody would use the telephone. So they suppressed it. | sidewndr46 wrote: | This seems like it is nonsense. Recording was well understood | to exist by the general public in the US by this point. Not | everyone had a cassette recorder, but plenty of people | understood that recordings could be made of audio. | kk6mrp wrote: | In a world where a phone line was shared between multiple | homes, knowing your neighbor may not only be listening, but | also recording, has the potential to be much more worrisome. | reaperducer wrote: | _Not everyone had a cassette recorder, but plenty of people | understood that recordings could be made of audio._ | | Yes and no. They understood that recordings _could_ be made | of audio, but they expected everything to be live and | ephemeral. | | That's why if you listen to old radio shows, very often the | introduction includes the phrase "...coming to you _by | transcription_ from {$city}... " | | "Transcription" is what they used to call recording, and | people were almost always told that what they were listening | to was not a live broadcast. | | It's so common, I have to wonder if there was a period in | time when it was a legal requirement. | Spooky23 wrote: | Remember that most people were on party lines. Third party | doctrine is key to privacy - maintaining the concept that the | call was an ephemeral event is key. | | Also, recording and eavesdropping was associated with rogue | phone company employees. We don't have strong wiretapping | laws because of the foresight of congress. Phone company | workers were crooked as hell. | Overtonwindow wrote: | But not Telephone. | | https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/spread- | answering-m... | sidewndr46 wrote: | I'm not really sure anyone counts "Smithsonian Magazine" as | a source. | Luc wrote: | Wasn't there a mobile phone system that worked with short-range | antennas spread throughout the city (e.g. New York)? You'd have | to stand in certain locations, indicated by a sign in the street, | to make your phone call. | | I can't find anything on Google so I'm wondering if it was a real | thing. | IMSAI8080 wrote: | There were several in the UK briefly. The idea was you'd pick | up your home cordless landline phone and take it with you, then | you could make a call anywhere you saw a "phone zone" sign. | Analogue mobile killed it pretty fast and it didn't take off. | roywiggins wrote: | It was a thing: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_%28telecommunications%2... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT2 | PreInternet01 wrote: | Yes, it was, and these were probably ETSI 300 131 cells | ('Cordless Telephone Type 2'), although I'm not sure any | networks based on this were ever deployed in the US: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT2 | | In Europe, CT2 networks briefly enjoyed some popularity, before | being superseded by NMT networks for public use sometime in the | 1990s. These were analog and had worse audio quality, but at | least allowed incoming calls (CT2 was outbound-only). | spinchange wrote: | As a Bell Labs fanboy this is one of my favorite bits of trivia. | They invented the future a long, long time ago. | BizarroLand wrote: | When I was a kid I was watching old reruns one day on a sick day | and I saw a black and white episode of the Andy Griffith show | where some rich fatcat from the city had a telephone in his car. | | This was in black and white so I assume the episode was from the | late 40's early 50's. I was really shocked that they had cell | phones back then. | chasil wrote: | A Soviet mathematician developed CDMA in 1935, and their first | mobile telephone was implemented in 1957. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-division_multiple_access#... | adrianmonk wrote: | This page has tons of detailed info about old (1946 and on) car | phones, including lots of photos: | https://www.wb6nvh.com/Carphone.htm | programd wrote: | What a great link! | | Speaking of car phones, one of the best depictions of a car | phone was in the 1958-1961 show "Peter Gunn", a cracking good | film noir TV series. Gunn had a car phone in his very cool 1959 | Plymouth Sport Fury Convertible (I so wish tailfins were still | a thing...) There's a picture of his phone from the show [1] | which seems to match the Western Electric model from the above | link [2]. | | Anyway, watch the show if you can find it - the epitome of | jazzy noirish cool. | | [1] https://www.pinterest.com/pin/peter-gunns-mobile-car- | phone--... | | [2] https://www.wb6nvh.com/MTSfiles/Carphone1.htm | Johnny555 wrote: | That's not exactly a mobile phone, the "phone" handset in the car | has a push to talk button that you'd have to push when you want | to talk, just like keying a microphone, it was single-duplex | communication just like a radio. | | The other end was just a patch between the radio network and | telephone network, which was relatively common before cell | phones, my dad could make calls from his company two way radio | back in the 70's by asking dispatch to route him through to a | phone, they'd make the call and tell him what channel to switch | to for he call. And of course there was no privacy, anyone on | that channel could listen (or talk) to your call. | jimktrains2 wrote: | By "single duplex" do you mean simplex (versus a single duplex | channel, which would allow simultaneous 2-way communication)? | Johnny555 wrote: | I think it's more "half duplex" - either side can transmit, | but over a single channel so only one at a time. | agumonkey wrote: | in a similar style, there were radio based lane tracking | installed in some highways so your car could stay centered.. it's | funny how far back these ideas were tried | SoftTalker wrote: | Similar technology used for instrument landings (ILS) at | airports. A radio beacon is centered on the runway and in poor | visibility pilots can use it to be sure they're lined up and on | the correct approach path before they can see the runway. | jl6 wrote: | When did we stop calling things radios and start calling them | mobile phones? | davidw wrote: | I think we lost something when we lost that accent for news. | tomcam wrote: | Although some things are eternal. The film clearly shows that | Ben Shapiro was already at work as some sort of assistant truck | driver, maybe putting himself through law school. Who knows, | maybe he should kept that gig. | pjungwir wrote: | Bell launched a video phone too, back in the 60s. You can read | about it in _The Idea Factory_ , which is full of fascinating | history. That book attributes the failure to people not wanting | to be seen. I've worked with people who definitely didn't want to | turn on their video on Zoom calls! :-/ | tomcam wrote: | There was a working version of it at Disneyland. | jamesbfb wrote: | And here's a great video about said video phone: | https://youtu.be/Xqb1o8up_Fw | | I'm scratching my head trying to figure out the mechanism of | that top down camera. | userbinator wrote: | I worked for a telecommunications product company a while ago, | and while all employees were given videophones (and there were | _conference_ videophones too), and actually used them quite | frequently compared to IM, they were almost always used in | audio mode only. | | Besides not wanting to be seen, it takes far more attention to | be looking at each other than it does to be talking while doing | other things. | ghaff wrote: | Yeah. I don't mind switching video on and do by default in a | smaller meeting and certainly 1:1. But, if I'm multitasking | I'll regularly switch the camera off if I can't/don't want to | be front and center with the webcam and keylight. | thinking4real wrote: | It's more comfortable not to be seen (you don't have to look | certain ways), but also I'm not about the idea that anyone can | record me and use my image for whatever reason they want | | When I'm compensated like a celebrity, Ill take on the risk. | Till then, you don't need to see my face to know what I'm | saying | ghaff wrote: | My sense is that video became widespread when networks got good | enough that it was effectively free if you were going to use | the network for audio anyway. There were companies like | PictureTel but I'm pretty sure both the equipment and | operational costs weren't things that consumers were going to | pay. | | There may have been social resistance early-on as well but I'm | sure grandma would have liked to see the new baby if the tech | were cheap and easy--even if people then, as now, don't | universally want to be on camera. | rmason wrote: | When I was just starting elementary school in Detroit my best | friends dad was a high power exec who had a radio phone. He would | sometimes take me to school as they lived just down the street. I | never saw him use the phone but my father told me once there was | a very small number available for the city and it was quite | expensive. | Spooky23 wrote: | A friend obtained a scanner that allowed you to hear one side | of those conversations for mobile and marine radio. | | We used to listen once in awhile. | | One guy in particular was hilarious - he'd call to let the wife | know the plane was delayed and he'd be home late, then call his | girlfriend to have her drop by the boat. The dude would talk in | very obvious "code". "Need some help with the salami", etc. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-01-27 23:00 UTC)