Originally published at: Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the first mobile phone call | Boing Boing
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The first mobile phone call involved talking and driving?
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Were they asking him about his car warranty?
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Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the first mobile phone call
Every motorcyclist & pedestrian ever will rejoice. /s
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Fortunately most early adopters had chauffeurs to handle that part.
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My dad’s first mobile phone required a briefcase-sized device in the trunk and a long antenna that was mounted through the trunk lid. At the time, he said the waiting list in the Pittsburgh area was almost 4 years long. The phone itself was just like a desk phone with a dial and it mounted directly onto the transmission tunnel. I can’t recall what year that was, but I think the car he drove was a 1963 Oldsmobile 98.
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That reference was my first thought!
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The end of mobile phones came about in the nineties. I know the guy who had the very last old mobile phone in the San Diego area. The phone company was begging him to cancel his service, as they had to keep operators employed in case he placed a call.
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That “Today’s Engineer” link is broken for me
The company I worked for in the '90s kept using them because they had better coverage than cell phones at the time (in Alberta, Canada). Lots of towers, lots of operators. Still had the trunk full of equipment too, probably from the 1950s or 1960s. One of my friends got an ICOM ham radio handheld that did all the same functions to use instead, made it seem like a modern service. Wildly illegal of course and probably could have been heavy fines for doing that.
I now regret developing technology to miniaturize early “cellular radio” telephones in the mid 1980s.
At the time, some of us in Silicon Valley actually thought cellphones would help civilization.
Bwa haha ha! In hindsight, that sounds pretty silly now, doesn’t it.
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Did this early model allowed an active phonecall, while the phone was moving, to be handed off from one tower to another? (Or is it implied that they cant move too far until the call is cut off?)
I only used them a handful of times, but my recollection is that frequent users if for instance moving along a highway knew from experience which towers would work the best in that region and could select which one to use (by asking the operator). I don’t think there was any handing off, but there was an incentive to keep the calls short due to the cost, so probably not a big deal.
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Very expensive and dicey service.
Because that was then.
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Funny that phone calls have come around again to be about as stilted as for those truck drivers now that many people refuse to place or answer a call. I like their speech rhythm though, and directness.
This seems to be a “phone patch” which was a common practice in amateur (and commercial) radio in the old days dating back to the early 1900s. An operator is needed to take the call request and dial the number, then connect the phone line to the radio transceiver. The mobile operator uses his or her own transceiver and a microphone with a push to talk button to communicate with the base station. The base transmits when it detects an incoming audio signal on the phone line. There is no system of cells and towers to hand off calls so if you get out of range your call ends.
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The operators felt differently, I’d imagine.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s ham radio VHF repeaters often had autopatches. The mobile walkie talkie had a DTMF pad. You would press “*” to go off hook, dial the telephone number, talk, then press “#” to hang up. There was a notorious incident where a Ham demonstrating one of these to the FCC commissioner made a business call, a serious violation. These predated cell phones by quite a bit, but there was no automatic trunking. The Ham could select trunks to remote towers, but only under control.
EDIT: fixing spelling
