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April 4, 2023

“You’ll Be Able To Carry Phone In Pocket In Future” – 1963 Newspaper Article Predicted the Invention of Cell Phones

An article from the April 18, 1963 edition of the Massfield News-Journal promised “You’ll be able to carry a phone in pocket in future.”


The article reads:
“Some day, Mainfielders will carry their telephones in their pockets.

Don’t expect it to be available tomorrow, though.

Frederick Huntsman, telephone company commercial manager, says, “This telephone is far in the future – commercially.”

Right now, it’s a laboratory development and it’s workable, allowing the carrier to make and answer calls wherever he may be.”

Other telephones of the future includes a kitchen loud speaking telephone, and a visual image telephone.

The kitchen instrument can be used as regular telephone, a loudspeaking phone if the housewife happens to be busy preparing a meal, or as an intercom station for the home.

The visual image telephone allows the parties to converse by way of a microphone and loud speaker while a miniature television camera transmits the image. The “TV phone” also will have a writer signature transmission system and a conversation tape recorder.

The new phones are being displayed at the Home and Flower Show at the Coliseum.”
The modern mobile phone wouldn’t hit the commercial market until the 1980s, but the idea of a pocket phone had been percolating for decades. In 1953, for example, the president of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. predicted that someday in the future the phone will be “carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today.” In 1926, inventor Nikola Tesla predicted that in the future people across the world would be able to communicate instantly with one another with devices that fit inside a vest pocket.

The idea of video phones (also mentioned in the above-displayed 1963 article) can be traced back much further than you might expect. In 1936, a German engineer developed a video phone service that allowed people to call (and see) each other from Berlin to Leipzig (a distance of approximately 100 miles).

(via Snopes)

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