1940s BELL TELEPHONE "MOBILE TELEPHONES" MOVIE EARLY CELL PHONE / MOBILE TELEPHONE SYSTEM 90884
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- Опубликовано: 2 янв 2025
- Created in the late 1940s, this film from Bell explains the operation of the Mobile Telephone Service (MTS) by showing how it can be used to make business more efficient. The film also shows some of the cutting edge equipment used in the system and shows how it was installed in vehicles (7:30).
MTS was a pre-cellular VHF radio system that linked to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). As such it used both radio signals and telephone lines to connect parties. MTS was the radiotelephone equivalent of land dial phone service. The Mobile Telephone Service was one of the earliest mobile telephone standards. It was operator assisted in both directions, meaning that if one were called from a land line the call would be routed to a mobile operator, who would route it to one's phone. Similarly, to make an outbound call one had to go through the mobile operator, who would ask for the mobile number and the number to be called, and would then place the call.
This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946. The original equipment weighed 80 pounds (36 kg), and there were initially only 3 channels for all the users in the metropolitan area, later more licenses were added bringing the total to 32 channels across 3 bands This service was used at least into the 1980s in large portions of North America. On October 2, 1946, Motorola communications equipment carried the first calls on Illinois Bell Telephone Company's new car radiotelephone service in Chicago.Due to the small number of radio frequencies available, the service quickly reached capacity. MTS was replaced by Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS), introduced in 1964.
All calls were placed by a suitably equipped telephone operator. Outgoing calls were placed when the operator connected to a base station (originally using a cord board, but by the 1990s could be done by dialing a code sequence from a TOPS position), then announced the call over the channel (giving the channel's name first), e.g., "Adams calling 2M-2368, 2M-2368, 2M-2368."
The page would usually be repeated twice more after a pause. The called party had to have their unit on and the volume set at a level that allowed them to notice a call and then listen to the called number. If the called party heard an incoming call, they would then use the microphone to announce they were receiving the call, and the operator would allow the two parties to speak, monitoring for the end of the call and marking a manual ticket for billing.
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From 1961 to 2011 my dad had a Two-Way Radio shop and was a General Electric Mobile Radio Dealer and sold and serviced the MTS and IMTS systems. I remember in the mid-seventies, my best friend and I were riding with my Dad in his business GMC step van. Dad asked my friend, "Do you want to call your mom on the phone?" Dad (Rotary-Dialed the number) on the IMTS set mounted to the wall of the step van. My friend said to his mother (in a tone of excited dis-belief), "Hi mom, I'm riding in Ed's truck!" Great memory, especially since my dad has past on.
Russ Wentz, that's a great story and a great memory. Puts into perspective how much luxury we have in our lives today. Back then, something like that was extraordinary.
@Robert Pearce Yeah, the 1970's were the heyday for the Two-Way Radio market. Dad was an intelligent and hard working man and business owner and earned every penny he made and then some! No, there weren't any coin operation, just used for a business field service van communications.
@nm I know, what kinda crap am I trying to pass along here anyway!
passed on, not past on.
wow it must been exhilarating experience to communicate wirelessly back in the stone age..
When I was age 8 in 1966, I got a pair of walky-talkies for Christmas that were on the same frequency as the Mobile Telephone service and you could listen in on mobile phone calls and even sometimes talk to the people making the calls. I had several Mobile phone people tell me that they were going to report me to the FCC, but they ain't never found me yet.
Children's walkie talkies were on CB 14, 11 meters, and AM and mobile telephones were on VHF FM, 2 meters. Nice story but it couldn't happen.
@Jim Robinson although many of the facts behind this story are missing, I find it highly doubtful that a parent would give an 8 year old child a PAIR of professional grade Motorola HT200 hand-helds as a toy for Christmas. While it "could have happened" in all likelihood it probably didn't. I can't imagine parents, out Christmas shopping, going to a communications outlet, looking at these heavy units and not knowing they weren't to be used as toys (nor a salesman not asking the intended use when helping the couple) and plopping down the cost of these radios for children's toy when they could have more easily went to the department store and gotten a pair of $20 walkie talkies, specifically built for kids.
Ours, during the 70's used to drive truckers on the interstate nuts and they would always say the FCC is coming for us.
@Jim Robinson Nothing worse than people who use that comical phrase "just saying." Of course you're just saying, you typed it, didn't you? And while you're going to use that, I'll return the favor by telling you what you're "just saying" has absolutely nothing to do with the leading comment, which was about a set walkie talkies given to an 8 year old child for Christmas. That's completely different to a child from police officer's family who "got" a hold of dads HT. If you're willing to swallow the Christmas gift story hook, line and sinker, that's your choice. I'll question it strongly based on extenuating circumstances.
Thx1138sober Hey Brother, born in ‘58 myself. I believe you. Also think you are in the clear.
The biggest technological advancement in my house in the 70s was getting a super long curly cord that allowed you to go outside or in another room to talk... state of the art... woo whoo .... yes, we only had one telephone :(
Yes and before everyone went Coo Coo for Cocoa Puffs~!!!
Keith Wilson was your sister always on it?
And We English would bring three things back from trips to the States. A Zippo, a phone with buttons and the long cord.
Did you have a girlfriend to talk to?
Keith Wilson I remember getting the 25 foot wall cord for the phone, talking outside was so bad ass.
In the early 1960s I helped my father to build 8 miles of telephone line (poles and wires) after a rural automatic exchange was installed within reach of our farm in Western Australia. We were advised to use copper wire but that length (16 miles) of copper wire would have been too expensive so we used a soft type of steel wire and to our great relief it worked perfectly for a couple of decades until an underground cable replaced it. Now the same farm is within range of a mobile phone tower.
I too have placed The 109 Steel Telephone wire as a lineman for The Bell System in 1969 and I still have my sleeve box with the aluminum sleeves to splice it and bridle it into the wire that went down the poles to a connector called a "Mouse Trap" so someone could attach it to their residence telephone. I really cherish those memories as you do and wish I could go back to those days again. 😃👍✌
*Things may change... but antennas stay the same...!!! (LOL)* 😂
Rais
I appreciate your comment!!!
In American West, famously a lot of farms used barbed wire to transmit the phone signal.
@@williamnavarre8169 Interesting dual purpose. I've never seen that but it would certainly work if the wire was connected to the fenceposts via insulators.
This is even more remarkable when you consider this service was available before most American homes had television.
I want that classic mobile phone model ..to replace the boring thin rectangular shape iphone/android ....
Most people still had black and white televisions until the late 1990s too. Long after real mobile phones.
@@sgillman16 that's not true at all, more than 50% of households with televisions had a color TV by 1972, and 98% of TV households had color by 1999. It was actually kind of hard to even find new black and white TVs for sale by the late '90s
@@11sfr I had a black and white tv in 1996
@@hewhohasnoidentity4377 You may have owned one in 1996 but when did you buy it? 20 years before?
My dad retired in 1980, and I asked him once if he kinda wished he had owned a cell phone. He replied, “Hell no. If I carried a cellphone, I would have never had time to think.” He certainly had a point.
He kinda had a point. But he is your dad, so you're biased
Mobile phones are great. The problem starts with the internet connectivity, you get so distracted checking your FB, Instagram, Whatsapp etc. etc. that you stop thinking, maybe that's what your Dad meant.
@@daitos1955 Internet connectivity is great. The problem starts with the social media apps.
Internet connectivity itself is not bad, given you can do things on the go you otherwise couldn't. Some important notifications can be pushed through HTTP requests which is much better than using phone lines and DTMF tones to connect.
@@sage_x2002 like credit cards, they're a double bladed weapon, they're of great help or they can financially bury you.
@@daitos1955 Yep, reason why not to use credit cards, rather debit cards and get a loan. Loans usually have lower interest too, compared to credit cards, for those who really want to do that instead of saving up
Mobile Telephone Service from AT&T (Bell) was $15 per month in 1949, with each call costing about 40 cents. While that sounds affordable, in today's dollars that would be $165 per month/almost $5 per call. There were limited channels, usually no more than 24 for a whole metropolitan area, you often had to wait more than an hour for an available channel to make a call.
This is why all mobile phone are now Cellular, by reducing the range of antennas, and increasing the number of them, based on user density, additionally making the protocols more efficient and automated, the successor AMPS system allowed a much better and cheaper experience
But you cannot compare, the service could cost not only 15 dollars, but 150 dollars and it would be profitable, it was dedicated to companies generating more work to make money, just with a call diverting a truck to serve a client, it would be more than profitable to pay these 15 dollars.
@@madriditunes7021 Yes, very different use case. It was for businesses. In today's money the $5 call would save potentially a few hundred bucks in labor and gas to re-send a different truck on a long trip.
AT&T normal long distance calls were VERY EXPENSIVE for decades. The source of countless family arguments each month ..."who the hell called.... for 30 mins !!!!"
@@KrustyKlown AT&T long distance was expensive for two main reasons. Phone service was provided by AT&T as a public necessity. The profits from long distance calls were used to subsidize the universally available wire-line phone service. A person living 20 miles from the nearest town was still entitled to phone service at rates comparable to the rates in town. It could cost AT&T hundreds of dollars per month to provide that hardware and the network it connected to. The second reason for the expense was simple. It was to discourage overuse of the long distance circuits. In 1946 a call from San Francisco to Los Angeles would have exclusive use of 400 miles of wire, dozens of amplifiers and maybe even a microwave or radio link. AT&T carefully set the prices low enough that it was practical to make business and important calls and at the same time it was expensive enough that parents did not let the kids spend more than a few minutes talking to grandma in the hills of Tennessee.
Disclaimer: I was an AT&T employee back in the 70s.
There's something so wonderful about these informational videos. Just simple, direct a bit innocent and authentic. Modern videos typically are patronizing, juvenile, manipulative, over the top and superficial.
"Great. That was the boss. Now we have to make another stop. I hate this damned phone!"
prokesuk 😂😂
That was their exact feeling, no doubt!
prokesuk or it's left handed. The head bolt
I’m a trucker. I agree. Now we have Qualcomm - we don’t even need a phone
B Christian funny scammer reply but how are the irs scammers going to constipate your belongings? Feed them lots of cheese and peanut butter? 😂😂😂
Everyone had the same voice back then lol. It’s like they had one narrator for every film.
Sounds like the same guy who used to narrate our school movies back in the 60s and 70s : )
It's called the transatlantic accent. Look it up
@@Thelonelyscavenger Nope, I choose to believe that it was just one irrationally busy dude. The nuclear bomb tests were just a cover for us shuttling him around the country on rockets.
Guys dressed nice back then, fedora hat and suit for everyday wear.
Yeah I’ve always wondered why that?? Seems like almost all men in the 30s-50s talked exactly like that, at least in narrated films. 🤔
My Dad worked for Bell Telephone for 30 years. During the massive fiber optic upgrade in the 80's I remember him saying it wouldn't be long before phone lines were going to be a thing of the past. He lived long enough to see the marketing of cell phones to the masses.
My father started in the early 70's with Southern Bell, then it changed to Bell South, then was bought out by AT&T in 2006. He retired in 2007 and he always told me the same thing. Today I don't know anyone that still has a landline at home.
@@tigerintheboro I still have a landline, since it's the most reliable type of phone service. I'm 47 years old and I don't recall even one instance in my entire life of my phone line not working. Even during the Great Ice Storm of 1998, I lost power like most everyone else around here, but I didn't lose phone service. Also, it allows me to use classic rotary phones as-is.
My mother and my aunt (her older sister) still have landlines too. My aunt has had the same phone number since the mid-1960s.
The masses mostly ditching landlines in favor of glorified walkie-talkies has mostly ruined telephone service though, because most everyone you talk to on the phone these days is on one of those ridiculous little devices and the sound quality sucks. To make matters worse, many people who say they have a landline don't really have a real landline at all, but rather, VoIP, which often sucks almost as bad as cell phones. About the only time I get sound quality on par with what I grew up with in the '80s is when my mother calls, because we are both on POTS landlines.
@@MaximRecoil in the 1993 movie Home Alone , the phone lines go down after a snowstorm and thats why the boy Kevin in the movie wasnt able to phone the police when the 2 bad guys were up to no good
@@tigerintheboro yes, they just work and never have dead batteries
@Tiger in the Boro my parents do for some unknown reason. The only people who call that number is telemarketers and people trying to scam them. They literally give the phone company $12 a month to hang up up on people.
We had a scanner at work and in the early 90s we could listen in on cell phone conversations. At first, you would hear "you'll never guess where I'm calling from" a lot. About a month later, after they got their first bill, it was "hey, I'm on my cell. let me call you back when I get to a (home)phone". We also caught someone cheating on their spouse. Someone from our shop ended up calling the guy and told him that we could hear everything he was saying. He was actually pretty grateful for the heads-up.
This is a crazy story!
In the 80s-90's, We could take a baby monitor outside under telephone wires and catch neighbors conversations!
Yup, I had a scanner as well. If I remember correctly it would scan thru many frequencies rapidly. I heard the teen boy 3 houses down telling his best friend that he wanted to be a women.. this was in the early 90s so it wasn't as common and accepted as it is today... But yeah, I would listen to all sorts of conversations. Once in a while you would know who it was , other times a mystery!!!
@@CarsCatAliens that's funny, my grandparents still had a party line, my sisters used to pick up the phone, keeping their finger on the receiver, unscrewed the microphone Part, unhooked that so they couldn't hear them
carefully, listen to The neighbors!
baby monitors were a thing in the 80s & 90s
But I started working in law offices as a teenager, later in life I was a director of a psychiatric halfway house-
I've heard too much!
for the last 20 years, I don't want to know-I don't listen to conversations, read diaries-some days I don't even ask people how they are lol!
I don't need to know -
I'm good!
Haha!
Oh yeah, Clara on Mayberry r.f.d. was a real thing.
I accidentally tuned into a telephone call when trying to adjust my TV... What a difference from today.
I feel like a time traveler watching this on my smartphone.
We are bud
imagine telling those people back then that in the 2000s many people will believe the earth is flat
I love these old briefs
I'm 67. This would have been my father's world just before my birth and I am watching it Smartphone.
Marty McFly, to the people of the '40s: "I guess you're not ready for this, but your great grandkids are going to love it!"
Greg Delia great scott
🤣🤣🤣
Hahaha, that ended up to be true for me anyway. Now.....The flying car!!
What do you mean "great"? Not even "grand" here. LOL
Well, you're the Doc, Doc!
Never knew this existed since the 40s. I'm really impressed
Ditto - Mandela Effect for me.
I am also very surprised.
Yes. Turned into a CB
It’s more of a proof of concept.. wasn’t really fully in service yet
LOL that's because it didn't
I love the cheerful music they used on these bulletins. Post war years seemed to be the most optimistic era in the last 100 years.
80 years later we still have dead spots on the interstate!
my GSM service has no Dead spots.
Its towers are Smaller and they are every 500 feet or so.
and GSM offers PCS services.
I can even use my Phone as a MODEM with a USB.
@Etienne Mohammed Omar's widow wants her Sat Phone back....
I still hit dead spots when driving through Centerville.
That's because you have Sprint or Tmobile
Mark Godfrey Verizon sucks in Oklahoma and other areas
'Sometimes a larger battery .. is needed for additional power.'
Yup. Still in 2021.
A "larger battery AND GENERATOR!" I'm thinking your car can only do two things at this point. Transport the driver and make phone calls.
Batteries have evolved extremely slow.
What amazed me is that you can't even BUY a mobile telephone for your car anymore. New I mean. Cell phones have totally replaced them.
@@retroguy9494 You can.
For example the
Pei Tel PTCarPhone 6 is a modern car phone.
It is a modern LTE/4g device. It supports voice over LTE (VoLTE) as well as 3G and 2G (GSM). In addition to voice telephony it supports 4G data and it is a mobile Wifi hotspot. With an external antenna you can expect much better reception than a smartphone inside off the car.
But that thing is expensive (over 600 € + installation cost).
In the early 2000s, I had a Nokia dock/speakerphone kit installed in my truck that never really worked right. So I wired it to switch the audio to an old payphone handset receiver that I had in my center console whenever I picked it up. It looked exactly like these guys in the video. I did it because those receivers are a lot easier to hold with your shoulder than cellphones. LOL
Love watching these old clips. Thanks for the upload!
Right bill
Me too
So welcome! It's kinda primitive 😆
I wonder if any of these old units still exist in working condition. I'd love to see a demonstration with a personal FM transmission.
@@jaythomas3180 maybe you can see them at your local Bell company.
...and I was impressed with someone who had a mobile in the 90's!
I worked for a small company that had a VHF mobile system in the early 90s and they gave me a mobile phone for my vehicle. I also had an 800 number pager, remember those? I retired from a big communications company working mostly high speed data over fiber, microwave and satellite delivering the bandwidth to other companies and our customers. What gets me is the government collects a tax on every phone number. When they started this households only had 1 phone and now they have many phones but every phone still has the tax.
I'm really impressed.I wasn't aware that such technology existed in the 40's.I was high tech for the period, and probably quite expensive.
From comment just below
"Mobile Telephone Service from AT&T (Bell) was $15 per month in 1949, with each call costing about 40 cents. While that sounds affordable, in today's dollars that would be $165 per month/almost $5 per call. There were limited channels, usually no more than 24 for a whole metropolitan area, you often had to wait more than an hour for an available channel to make a call.
@@CFox.7 Great fact!Thanks for sharing!
Having built cellular sites most of my adult life. It was interesting to take a look back at the industry in its infancy. How cell phones have changed in just the last 25 years. The phones in this video make the old bag phones and Motorola "brick" look modern. My generation was probably the last generation to grow up without a phone in their pocket.
You only need a phone if you have something to say. So it worked out well for you.
I am watching this video on my mobile telephone. 😂
Yeah yeah ok whatever.....
Me too
Didn’t even think about the irony until you mentioned it
👋😂👍guilty!
Saying no way, it'll never happen -- whilst watching on my modern cell phone -- fully enthralled
That's awesome
Even more amazing is how Joe knew the truck had plenty of room for the undisclosed amount of "stuff" they had to pick up.
Or that he bothered to answer the phone.
😂😂😂
A good driver (especially one doing what is known today as LTL, Less Than Truckload) knows what he has on his truck/trailer. 😉
@@MirlitronOne Being treated as a business telephone, he would have answered. Different mores, back then.
The company picks up the same packages from each business. So they know exactly what they are going to pick up. I know that's hard for you to use your brain but it's really simple to figure out
Presentations and voice behind the camera was absolutely divine in old days 💥
When I was a kid there was an older lady in the neighborhood that was a retired operator from Bell Telephone. They trained her to be one of the first mobil operators in Philadelphia. She told us that the first car phone in Philly belonged to one of the Wanamakers of the Wanamaker's Department Store family. I forget exactly what she told it it cost but I remember thinking it was more than most people make. She said he used it a lot. I guess they had the money
Now they literally give phones away. Joke was on them.
@@Anarchist86ed She told us about it in the 70's when we first started seeing people around with car phones. She was talking about the late 40's, early 50's. I don't even know if she said what the equipment cost. It was the rate per minute that shocked us. It was something crazy like 5 or 10 dollars a min. Huge money in 1950ish.
Trading Places?
@@cindytepper8878 I remember getting 600 dollar a month phone bills. My boss was dropping several thousand dollars a month. Ugh.
Why do you women go online and just rant about some boring story no one gives a shit about ?
I had no idea that mobile phones were available in the 1940’s. I’m 62 years old and thought it was only available in the 1960’s. Amazing!
I watched this video on an airliner over the Atlantic Ocean. Life is wonderful.
Cool. When is this service coming to my community? I can't wait.
We're sorry, but the number you are trying to reach is not in service, or has been disconnected due to the Gooberment owned FCC taking away that frequency range for its own needs. Please check the number or try your call again after a revolution. Message ID # 1776.....LOL !
It will be available to serve you in about 70 years ago. Please contact us then, thank you.
AKA Carphone.
Soon very soon.
Wait. What if they use this technology to track people?
Gotta love technology, even 1940s tech. This is really cool to watch these old films and see how advanced we were after WWII and how similar the technology of that day is fairly similar to what we have today, eight decades later. Thanks for the upload.
Back then, anyone needed to know the roads, street names, highways, and routes very well. GPS did not exist and maps were not updated often enough to show new roads. I remember available and installed along the highways were for emergency use only. Great video and thank you for sharing!
Thanks to Joe and Bill, for that fabulously monotone back and forth.
I'm so glad there are so many videos like this that survived. This is so interesting and educational. I never knew they had this capability then!
If only they didn't plaster them with watermarks and timestamps
Thanks for the history lesson. Our family doctor had a mobile phone which in the 1950’s we called a car phone. Now I understand better the technology that went into that system.
Thank you for the video and EVERYONE commenting how they knew about this. My dad had a rotary dial phone in his car before 1970 and I wondered if he was some type of special ops G....or if I imagined the whole thing! LOL Thank you all!
How rich are you? Lol
@@26MECH special ops G rich lol
@@jackbennett4828 lmao hell yea I dig it
I wish people still talked like this- slow and calm - today everyone’s so wacked out on drugs -no one communicates like humans -
Truth.
Yes, this is true.
Hanging out with alot of druggies do ya? Maybe it's time to reconsider the company you keep. 😆
No it’s painfully slow! It makes me sleepy
Leave my drugs out of this!!
It'll never happen.....
Way to dangerous, using a "phone" whilst driving....
If you looked carefully, they didn't include buttons to distract you, you HAD to talk to the operator to make a call. But don't call her Siri, that's probably not her name.
you talk silly talk ,,,,.=^oo^=,,,,
@John C . Our govt has banned it, many years ago, still see people at the wheel with a phone in hand though. More dangerous than drink driving imo.
in case you didn't notice, the man using the phone was NOT the driver, it was the passenger. So, it was Not dangerous, fool.
@@dannygroom3327 - That's actually been proven to be true, btw!
This reminds me of the old film projector movies that were used to teach us in the elementary schools of the 1960's.
A lot of those were converted to DVD, and I rented them for home schooling. Some of them were really well made and interesting. Unfortunately, the company sold out to Netflix, and they eliminated half of them.
I remember when the phone was in the vehicle and not portable yet. Loud speaker or horn would blow when a call came in. Same era, we had some pretty good two way radio systems that covered almost 100 mile radius depending on terrain and weather. Rainy weather seamed to make it carry further, like FM radio bouncing off the clouds. Had an FCC radio license to operate those and a 100+ watt repeater on lease up on a local mountain.
Yes and if the frequency assigned to the service was busy they had to wait until that call was finished. I was in the business when IMTS existed, in the 70s. With that you could dial a number from the mobile, listen to other conversations sharing the channel but the call to you was routed through a mobile phone operator. Air time was charged by the min. about $3.50 in 2020 dollars. The mobile unit was about $5K in 2020 dollars.
About the cost of Iphone 11
In the days when mobile phones were on either the VHF low or VHF high bands, anyone who had a radio scanner or a tunable VHF receiver could listen in on your conversations as well. Even most cell phones were analog until about 10-15 years ago. There was no way to stop people from eavesdropping on mobile telephone calls until the cellular companies switched their networks to digital modulation.
Indeed, I used a VHF radio telephone back in the day, it had a series of frequencies available for a call, you would speak to the mobile operator. Years later, I had a mobile telephone, it was analog, and had a 5 watt transmitter. This was the first generation of "cellular" telephones. Little briefcase rig. Back then, airtime was about $1.60 a minute, in the 1980s. Yep, the old days. Think about this, one month, I had a thousand dollar bill, hehe. In 80's dollars.
Most folks don't realize, but the later Motorola unit I had, yes, the famous StarTAC, was digital. If I recall, 24 people could tank simultaneously on one frequency, as it used packets of digital data. This innovation is the reason why cellular literally exploded, as one repeater could handle many times more calls.
Today, we take mobile telephony for granted.
I retired from AT&T/Bellsouth and they still make videos like this for training inside the company that have to be watched every year.
That's depressing af
This is so awesome! When I was a kid in the mid '70's, I had an Admiral Police/Weather/Fire/"Car-Phone"/CB radio with no transmitter. It was simply a radio to listen in on public calls, and being a kid, it was so much fun to hear the calls that people dialed in their cars [by then, they dialed and you could hear the transmitter via FM radio to telephone and believe me, the calls were quick, because they were terribly expensive].
Even into the 90s it was possible to hear some cell phone calls. I could do it back then on my TV if I tuned it to the right unused channel. But I couldn’t hear full conversations because the calls would switch towers and frequencies as the phone traveled, and also I could only hear one side of a conversation.
Indeed. Back then at least, there was an audio tone placed on the MTS channel to indicate it was clear. One could find such channels by listening for the tone. But, it'd be annoying to endure the 1000-Hz tone for very long. At least one electronics magazine published a construction project for a tone detector that would silence an external speaker when the tone was present, but switch it on when the channel was active. 🤓
@@Sashazur In the analog days, when cellphones were bricks, bags, or mounted in the car. Then came the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, and the subsequent switch to digital, encrypted cellphone service. Among other reasons, because someone disclosed the phone calls (already illegal under then-existing law) of a Senator. The rest, as they say, is history. 😒
As you grew up, you had a fine career with the NSA, monitoring communications!
@@Sashazur That's right! UHF TV channels 80 to 83 were then using the same frequencies as the cell phone network. I, too, could hear cell phone conversations on my portable TV. It was complete incompetence by the FCC to assign such frequencies, when just a little higher up they could have assigned unused frequencies to the cell band( frequencies that are still basically unused even to this day).
The CGI used in this video from the 1940 is amazing
This is incredibly intersting. I'm 60yrs old and had never heard of the earliest mobile phone services that were actually used. I only remember the CB craze and the old huge mobile phone's connected too huge batteries. Too think the earliest version of mobile phone calling was in the early 40's. 🤔 Wow cool. CB Radios were pretty cool back in the day. My dad's handle was, Silver Fox. 😊
You sometimes see the mobile phones of the era on old Perry Mason shows. Private detective Paul Drake had one that apparently took up half his trunk.
So your dad was Charlie Rich? (Silver Fox). He could have been the inspiration for the very first discotheque in the USA, which opened in 1975, in Reseda, Calif, called the Silver Fox. My cousin did the logo for that, and he told me that it was the first disco to open in the USA, two years before Club 54 in NYC.
I only remember it from early 70’s Mannix shows but it seems that he only had calls from Kitty.
How is your Dad these days
Car phones pre dated these my 65 year old mother taught me this when I was a little kid in the 90’s
Saying no way, it'll never happen -- whilst watching on my modern cell phone -- fully enthralled
Video: "He called long distance"
My son: "Dad, what does 'long distance' mean?"
Check this out, Joe Friday making a long distance call in 1954. It wasn't until I heard this that it really hit me what a big deal it was making a long distance call in the old days. voxperitus.com/telephone-history/
@john hansberry that's hilarious!!!
And why is he spinning that ring with his finger?
bash.org/?142934
Next questions could be: "Dad, what's an 'operator'?" or "A 'Phone Booth?' What's that??"
Great film.The definition of 'compact' certainly has changed a bit over the years. 😉
Good thing that gasoline was cheap back then; needed to be in order to haul around those "compact and neatly installed" vacuum tube radio transmitters, receivers and the extra battery and generator!
They wouldn’t believe their grand kids will all have a mobile phone, camera, computer, music player, video, GPS, news , game player, bank service, shopping, and much more rolled into one handheld device!
Big deal. All it did was turn them into brain-dead monkeys.
Or on their wrists.
@@AggiePhil are implanted into their brains which is actually happening
And they carry all of that in their pocket or a hand bag
Thank God for quantum mechanical technology.
I worked for Bell Atlantic and later it became Verizon as a lineman. They showed us this video every couple of weeks. That was in the 90's. Yet we still had two way radios and pagers.
Well, NASA made it work from Houston to the Moon...
@@jojobascug8829 Not quite. The Bell System was responsible for getting the signals from the BIG dish at Goldstone in California (and others in Australia and Spain) to Goddard in Maryland and then to Houston and back. Bellcore handled so much for NASA. It couldn't have been done without them. Nothing came directly into Houston. The network they built is an amazing study in itself.
Everyone on these old films talked like guys from gangster movies.
Like a scene from a film noir .
Alright, see here, Joe. The dames had class back then, I tell ya. They had class and they had looks. But they weren't easy. A guy had to sell himself. Hard. And I mean real hard. And all the time. From morning til night. One slip up and the word would get around. Fast. This town has ears. He'd never get a date again. Wasn't good enough to be gangster just at the bar. You had to sound tough all the time. Everywhere. Even in your truck. A guy never knew when a dame was listening. And listening good.
"The Boss wants us to pick up a 'special' at the Depot."
lol, I kept getting the sense that a crime was about to be committed. It was like a lost episode of Dragnet. But O my, the wireless communications and those film graphics were incredible. Very crafty people were at work and I tip my hat to them.
This was a special type of radio accent and voice which was created on purpose to be clear. People had to be trained to talk like this
Several years ago I was exploring the files, etc on one of my older cell phones. It was no surprise to me that I found software and other technology that had been designed and in use in the late 60s early 70s.
1945: "Mike, how's the construction job going?"2020: "Mike, we have detected a problem with your Microsoft account."
Can't wait for this to be made avaliable to consumers.
Growing up in Melbourne (Aust), I recall my dad buying a late 50's Desoto as a second hand car and it had a phone in it. We never imagined such a thing could exist, but it certainly lit up my imagination. 25 or so years later I was an early buyer of a mobile "technophone" that cost me over $4000 and could allegedly fit in your pocket, as long as you didn't mind carrying a half kilo slab the weighed down one side of your pants.
sounds like the Motorola MX350 Walkie talkie of the 90s
Maybe I have the same thing--it's a "technophone" from Radio Shack. Might be a different model as I don't see how mine could fit in a pocket, unfortunately it doesn't work anymore.
I worked as a telephone operator and we received and made mobile phone calls. This video reminded me of that time. Nice memories.
Those guys had no idea how lucky they were being able to "go on the road" and NOT receive phone calls from their boss - or nagging wife.
James haha
@Michigan Wolverine in Dallas When they know you have it, they also know you're not answering them.
nagging wife? MGTOW!
What's a wife?
石尸丹丁丹廾彐丁囗 中仈丹仁片囗 today a wife is a much the same as a boat anchor
Loved the stiff acting, reminds me of the old "Highway Patrol" with Broderick Crawford!
@The Kraemer That was Dragnet, and they did a GREAT bit where Sargent Friday had to make a long distance call, and we heard all the steps it took. It wasn't until I heard that old radio show that I "got" why long distance used to be such a big deal.
It's because they weren't on drugs
We use this in Scotland it took over from two bean tins attached with string last year.
Bean tins? Bean Tins? You were lucky! Here in out back Aussie we still use camel caravans to pass messages. It's quicker than the national broadband network.
@Gribbo9999 You did it. You had to go and did it. Now the animal rights group will be on your a$$ for misuse of animals. Forcing them into groups when they don't want to and loading them up with things they don't want and force marching them out in that hot sand when they don't want to. Oh hell... here they come now............
Gribbo9999 Camels! Camels!........We'd love to 'ave Camels......our bean tins had rusty ragged ends that used to rip off your earlobe and don't get me started on how many cyclists we lost with our sharp string!
Have they adopted the English "pound" for currency there, or are they still using the more traditional "knuckle sandwich"?
I used to use spaghetti bolognaise tins, but I've since upgraded to ravioli.
This was very fascinating and interesting. My husband worked for Verizon and he told me that during training he learned about cell phones in the 40’s. I guess he was right.
These weren't really cell phones, they were radio receivers / transmitters.
Cell phones are so named, because there are small areas that are covered by a single tower. These are "cells", and they have some overlap. As you move from one cell to another, your phone silently switches to another tower on another set of frequencies. In this way, you can have a million people in a city using their cell phone at the same time - often using the same exact set of frequencies, but not in the same cell.
These had basically a single transmitter and receiver and they used a TON of power, and only a few people could be using their radio phone at a time.
These didn't take off, because they were no better than a walkie talkie.
Nikola Tesla predicted 100 years ago that people would have devices for information that would fit right in their vest pocket.
Whats a vest
There was a gentleman who worked for RCA back in the late forties. He predicted communication satellites, hand held communication devices, etc. I can't remember his name, but he sure was spot-on.
The cell phone is here but we're are those vest jackets damnit I want one!🌀🌀🌀🌀
@@bcgrittner Are you talking about Arthur C Clarke? While he didn't technically invent geostationary comm sats, he was the one who popularised them. Though hie were a trio of giant manned stations at 120 degrees around the orbit, allowing them to cover the entire Earth. The actual person who first proposed them was a Slovenian engineer by the name of Herman Potočnik, in 1928, though he didn't suggest them for mass broadcasting, simply as relays. Going back further Tsiolkovsky in 1903 was the one to first describe a geostationary satellite.
@@stainlesssteelfox1 You are probably correct. Clarke did, indeed, popularize the satellite theory, but there were others. There was even a theory of radio relay by satellite in Germany in the 1920's. Clarke even considered sending astronauts to space to replace the burned out vacuum tubes in the satellites. There was a Dr. Gary Gordon who worked with the geostationary satellite theory and became part of the team that created the TIROS weather satellites of the 1960's. I vividly remember the TELSTAR satellite from 1962. That was not geostationary, but was remarkable. And, we progress.
WOW. I didn't know the mobile phone was that old. Dang. This was way cool to learn. Thanks Periscope. :-)
In the early 1960s there was a TV show about a private eye that revolved around him having a phone in his car. That was a very uncommon thing then.
@@lwilton Perry Mason's detective Paul Drake had a car phone in at least one episode.
It was first patented in 1917.
I had no idea this started in the 1940’s. Interesting!
I worked at a pro photography store from 1976 till 1979, well before cellular telephone service, and we had four customers that had mobile telephones in their cars. They would often order film and other photo supplies from their mobile telephones and swing by to pick them up. The call quality was not as good as a landline, but it got the job done. I remember one of our customers who had mobile telephone service show us the equipment in the trunk of his car. It wasn't as bulky as the equipment in the video, but it still took up a corner of his trunk. When I left the business in '79 for a better paying job, my boss just had mobile telephone service installed in our store delivery station wagon. How times have changed.
The "compact" units reminded me of the old aircraft radios. When I was in the USAF during the Vietnam era the radios in most of the military aircraft were about the size of one of today's full size tower PCs. They weighed about 30 pounds. On the larger aircraft, to change one, you would have to climb straight up a ladder for about 10 feet carrying a 30 pound radio with you.
So you had the "Green Acres" TV show version!
Don't forget about Dick Tracy comics where detective Dick Tracy had a cell phone essentially on his wrist vs a watch. He saw the other person and visa versa. Good imagination from the 1940's.
Or that 60th tv series "Get Smart" with all that secret telephones build in absolute every random item.
I liked Agent 86's (Don Adams) Shoe Phone better in "Get Smart". Now that was futuristic!
"Hold everything!"
You have it correct in the description, but not in the title. These were not 'cell phones.' There were also a very limited number of channels available in a metro area. When I worked at AT&T in NJ, I had the fun of being able to talk to the guys at Bell Labs who invented and developed cellular service. It was so interesting. They were so laid back about it, as though it was just routine engineering. They changed the world.
Possibly they were laid back about it because the US was behind the game when it came to cell phone service. There was some early work in deploying a cellular service in Chicago in 1978, but the first real nationwide cellular service was launched in Japan in 1979. It took the US until 1983 to launch what would become AMPS, the first 1G system in the US.
@@stevesether To be fair, Japan is a lot smaller than the US and distance is a big factor with cell phone service. The cell carriers still struggle with deploying more towers today with having to buy off local politicians who can get the approvals through against constant backlash from the "not in my backyard" locals who don't want to see the towers (but want cell service in their area).
@@stevesether You're referring to the late 1970s 30 years after this film was made in the late 1940s. There were several other technical improvements over that time that allowed 2-way radio to become more dominate. Then satellite communication changed everything. Then AT&T made their decision to do everything possible to protect their extensive landline investment and basically ceded the mobile/cell phone business to others. The cell industry is doing the same thing trying to protect their current infrastructure investment from satellite phone service that many other countries are moving towards.
@@joeyager8479 Yes, I understand the ideas of why it took a while to get real cell phone service. Primarily it's because we needed integrated circuits to handle the intelligence of handling the cell handoff and management of which cell to connect to. Radios and some simple circuits are just too dumb for that.
I'm not sure your analogy of satellites replacing cell phones to cell phones replacing land lines is entirely accurate.
There's just some basic physics and communication theory that tells us that transmitting to something 1 mile away (or much shorter for 5g, more like hundreds of feet) is going to take less power and give you more bandwidth than transmitting to something at least 60 miles away.
@@stevesether I'm no expert in the physics of communication, but I have read that poorer countries have found it to be less expensive to contract to have communications satellites built and launched and use satellite phones than to invest and maintain a cellular telephone system or conventional landlines.
My point is that large corporations that have invested millions of dollars in infrastructure will do everything in their power to retain their monopoly to protect their investment. In the end, it doesn't prevent the new technology from developing and taking over - it just delays it for a while. It happens to all legacy industries. It's currently happening worldwide in the auto industry regarding BEVs. For all their current talk, it's the new startups that are outselling the legacy manufacturers in BEVs. It was a Kodak moment long before Kodak became the butt of their own advertising promotion.
This is so remarkable as I didn’t know there were mobile phones way back in the 40’s! I like reading people’s comments because it helps me understand how this all worked. It must have been awful if you were stranded back then with no mobile phone or a means to call for help.
mobile phones in the era of telephone operators, amazing!
back when two people were in trucks... one could answer the phone while the other was driving. get your shit together people, we need this today.
Too costly! Truckers are going to be replaced by self-driving rigs as soon as the technology is mature enough because it will save the company money and increase profits. You can make a self-driving truck work 24/7/365 only stopping for fuel and repairs and you don't have to pay them. You can only make a trucker work ten hours (if I remember right) and have to pay them too. If you do teams (two drivers), you still have four hours of downtime per 24 and the cost is more than a single driver. If the wheels aren't rolling, the company isn't making money, and due to competition, they have to pay as little as they can get away with to keep making big profits. The first companies to use self-driving trucks stand to make huge profits since there will be no driver to pay and no downtime except for refueling and repairs. The big problem with self-driving rigs is, how are they going to refuel? There are no full-service diesel pumps that I'm aware of.
@Mark Reaves with thinking like that we'd never progress. Technology is to used to ease mans burden, not replace him. In the capitalist west people lose jobs and suffer because of technology whilst in the socialist East people's jobs get easier with the same pay. It all comes down to human greed.
@@NotSoCrazyNinja I'm pretty sure that the big name truck stops will be happy to add full service if they can charge a big enough premium for the service to be profitable.
Soon, no people will be needed. Auto pilot will be common place.
@@NotSoCrazyNinja You still need a CDL to manage a driverless truck.
Just 30 yrs ago, I was a Mercedes tech, and a "professional car phone installer". That didn't last long.
thats real neat... i still use my lexus ls400 car phone it was analog but i made it work digitally
@@NewsBroadcasting Cool, you should make a video showing how!
@@JoeUrbanYYC do u have one installed
Years ago I had an old, bulky Motrac (Motorola) unit in the trunk of my car. They used frequencies in the 150 MHz VHF range. One time I was about 250 miles from my home city and was up on an 11,000 foot mountain. I was able to reach the mobile operator in my city directly.
The compact equipment installed in the trunk is amazing. How can they put so much technology in such a small package?
Through the miracel of Tube technology
It wasn’t that small the entire trailer was taken up by the rest of the communication gear
i think this is magic or witchcraft or sumthin ,,,,=^oo^=,,,,
Beats me. But if uncle Sam can build an atomic bomb, anything's possible.
The very next year the motor car companys responded with half acre sized trunks for increased range equipment...then, the "transistor" revolutionized trunk space LOL
“Here a transmitter unit and a receiver unit are being compactly and neatly installed.” Hahaha, ‘compactly’
Yeah, I know. Those units are barely compact. But, considering the time frame though, that might have been considered compact.
And don't forget, you MAY need a larger generator and Battery...Just like modern mobile phones.
I'm having my car door painted with one of these "Equipped with Mobile Radio Telephone Service" signs tomorrow.
ADVERTISING really helps THIEVES! 👍😂
That would be confusing and awesome
I can't believe this existed in the 40s... Wild!
I had no idea this system was in place a far back as the 40s! This was long before the advent of the trasnsitor too. They really know how to make the best with what they had to work with.
Fascinating to watch this. I had a truck some years back and fitted a thing called a TMR which worked like a two way radio and could also connect into the telephone network. I was stopped on a major highway one afternoon due to fires closing the road. Ended up spending the night there. The mobile telephone towers and equipment huts were burned out and nobody had any service. My TMR remained in operation throughout and many people came to me asking if they could call their home to let family know they were OK to which I obliged. It too had a PTT and many would fail to relaease when trying to talk.
It's Trunk Mobile Radio. Similar but not identical to the Cell Phone network. it's analog in the past and has become digitally operated currently.
What most people don't know is that back then, the radio signal had to transmit uphill in both directions in the snow with no shoes.
Love the "Compact" Send and Receive Units in the Trunk!
I hope the costs come down so everyone can have these.
In the late 60's we had a mobile phone in our car. It had a lot of electronics in the trunk of the car. It was a two way radio working with repeaters. It had 6 channels. When lifting and pressing the talk button the mobile operator would answer. I would give my account number and the number I want to connect to. She would connect the call. This phone system worked with a repeater system.
Many, many thanks to the "old timers" and hobbyists/historians for all their comments. It has honestly been as fascinating to read the comments as watch the video!
That is Nuts! The future looks awesome!
I remember the teletype station in the state hospital where my father worked in the fifties, seeing the output with no one pressing the keys was amazing to me as a child.
I remember a Citizen Band integrated telephone system in 80s comprised of two units. One was the home unit with a roof antenna, attached to your land phone. The other was a handset, typically a CB radio. Any call received by your home unit would be relayed to your handset. I was fascinated by that equipment, not knowing anything about future of course :)
@Sar Jim, interesting comment and thank you for the great explanations. I got in on the very tail end of those days as an FM mobile radio technician. I installed, operated, maintained, serviced and repaired about 300 mobile radios, about 7 mountain top repeaters covering 3 states and numerous base stations in the VHF and UHF frequencies. We operated at 30, 34 & 38 mHz in the VHF band with one point to point and repeater channel. The extended range of a repeater operating at 10000 ft H.A.T. provided coverage for close to a 300 mile radius. The mobiles ran the max legal limit of 100 Watts. Point to point for ranges inside a 100 miles and the repeater for longer. We also operated at 171 and 412 mHz. The 171 mHz mobiles ran about 80 Watts into the antenna and the 412 mHz about half that. Pure radio commo eliminated the need for a PBX, channel modems, multiplexers and an extra transmitter and receiver. In my day, there were still many radio telephone services around and Ma Bell used them well into the 60's or 70's. The old VHF and UHF mobiles were powered by the vehicle battery and dynamotors for the all tube tranceivers. I believe the alternators were 120 amp buffered by a large capacity vehicle battery which supplied DC to the dynamotor which supplied filament and B+ voltages to the tubes.
Big deal. My dad was a TV repairman in the 1950s. So what?
Very cool! Not you foobar, ura dik.
“@“ doesn’t work that way.
@@foobarmaximus3506 my dad looked like fat Elvis.
Were fm radio stations running at that time? That spectrum of radio waves must've been crowded if both systems were in use.
Man, I miss the days when I was a kid with no phone. When you were gone, you were gone.
Man I don't. If I could have had a smartphone in the 70s I'd have rocked that thing!
2:24 "Leigh construction company, Martin speaking"..... "Hello George"
😆 This killed me!
Easily explained. His name was George Martin.
I think he had too many MARTINi's
@@stevegallant3395 Wilko @ delta 4 Silko on hawkeye @ 674.673 ° N 985.09° S
Trayfox/ Foxytray 114' ~ 667`` 10 mils. Strait5 @ G N O SW 32..6 ° NE 154° Sea flux and Sunbox * 43 + 58 '' due East... Non Barco or Mapco. INSTIO.
Set my watch on grid bearings; can't get lost.. That's why the Crow & the Swift are so special.
Ok, back to sleep now..For the faithful few; meet you all in Paradise sometime soon...... Bye, not good- bye.
@@stevegallant3395 5
I knew that mobile phone service dated from the 1940's, at least in some areas. It was very expensive and had limited capacity, because each base station was a single cell, but it worked. It even predated the transistor. Those big boxes shown in the film were made using tubes.
I started working for a communication tower manufacturer in 1996 and the feeling then was that we'd have enough towers within 5 years or so. When I left the company in 2008, we couldn't build them fast enough and were shipping about 2000 per year.
Imagine seeing then what we have now. Hi def phone, tv, music in the palm of our hands. Crystal clear TVs as thin and light as a portrait on the wall. We're all spoiled and unappreciative of our amazing luxuries.
Now we have fewer jobs that pay a living wage, more pollution, more waste, larger landfills, cheap disposable goods, rarely being able to completely unplug, and so many other issues.
For every technical marvel we have there is a consequence we have to pay.
@@taoofjester4113 unemployment is low. There were major employment issues in the early 80s. Unfortunately, people want to have an entry-level job pay them like a career. There have always been struggles and people who have risen above it to succeed.
I had actually seen one of these in a vehicle in the late 1960s. it was a state forestry jeep that was being driven by --surprise! a state Forester
At least it wasn't a Subaru Forester.
Wow, driver and co-driver, each one able to start a family and buy a house on a single income... That's the most amazing part of this video.
...probably working 70 hours a week, plus holidays. And having lower bills because they likely didn't have multiple cars per household, one phone line per house (with long distance calls - even to the next town over sometimes - being considered expensive), no cable, *no TV* even, a handful of AM radio stations they could listen to, no AC (so a much lower power bill), and the US having about the only really healthy economy on the planet (because we not only didn't get bombed into rubble, but were making money rebuilding Europe and Japan)...
His wife, unless she just wanted a career outside the home, probably didn't have to earn an additional income, and they paid next to nothing in taxes.
Emocionante video de los albores de la telefonía móvil, si bien años antes ya se estaban probando, pero en este comercial ya era a nivel general. Claramente era épico lograr hacer esos equipos, y que fueran prácticos, pero había un incentivo muy fuerte por lo económico, la visión a largo plazo, y la capacidad del norteamericano de hacer dinero con soluciones de todo tipo, y hasta inventar una necesidad que no estaba planteada, es admirable. Un detalle, en ese momento las comunicaciones por radio, no eran Full Duplex, basicamente eran un Handy conectado a la red de telefonía pública. Saludos desde Argentina.
The first time I overheard a mobile telephone conversation was in a grocery store, I was in Aisle 8:
"Hi, where are you?"
"I'm in Aisle 9, where are you?"
"I'm in Aisle 7..."
It took me awhile to think of cell phones as anything other than an expensive toy after that!
2:25 Man 1: "Lee Construction company, Martin speaking."
Man 2: "Hello George".
🤣
that's George Martin, fifth Beatle on the right
@@rancher12121 Before he got his big break .
"Yeah what's the matter whit it"
😆
I wonder if these people envisaged that 80 years later these things would control the lives of virtually every person in the World under the age of 60, or imagined the look of helpless panic in the faces of the bewildered sheep as they hold their "devices" up to the sky in search of the ever elusive "signal".
Thank you Periscope for bringing us these forgotten glimpses of history that would be forever gathering dust on shelves if not for you.
They envisaged, my dear, they envisaged.
(Facializing has a long tradition...)
That battery ....wow! 6 volt and 200 amps later!
Amazing… so much ingenuity… nothing was impossible…
"He would use his regular business telephone to dial long distance" OMG! Not long distance! That used to cost you a mega fortune!
simply cell phone
Yup, and you had to wait until after 5 PM local time or call on the weekend to get the reduced rate for long distance! I remember those days.
Still, my sister won't call more than a few miles away because it's long distance. In Ohio land lines are that way still.
@@bazlebreeze9938 it is just cell phone
And he is having to make a guess where his truck might be at a certain time, to use the right repeating station. Chances are that he'd be wrong more than right.