Pocket Telephones Are Coming

In the spring of 1919, news out of the Marconi Company—the folks who invented radio, or “wireless telegraph” in the previous decades—was that they were working on a new type of wireless telephone that would make it “possible to speak between London and New York.” Commercial service was slated to begin in 1920.

Also mentioned in the press releases was that Marconi was woking on a portable, pocket version of a wireless telephone that “will be in every day use at no distant date.” Some astute critics at the time correctly guessed at how disruptive such a device would be to polite society.

None was more prescient than this comic appearing in The Daily Mirror in 1923.

As press releases tend to do, this one made predictions that failed to materialize, at least in the near-term timeframe mentioned. Commercial wireless phone service did make an appearance in the mid to late 1920s, first as a means for ships at sea to communicate with one another, and then decades later as a car-to-landline service for the growing automobile segment.

Automobile service was kludgy at first, requiring the user to ask an operator to dial a land-based number and patch in the connection. Radio gear attached to telephone poles would then allow the signal to move around with the vehicle. Developments towards the end of the 1950s allowed for the user to dial a number directly from the automobile radio unit, without the intervention of an operator.

A first, truly portable wireless telephone was invented in 1973 by Martin Cooper, the godfather of the modern cellphone, and brought to market in 1983. The rest is known history.