[HN Gopher] Bell Telephone launched a mobile phone during the 1940s
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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.
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(page generated 2023-01-27 23:00 UTC)