Back in 1926

Time marches on and we forget. We use mobile phones and forget that the idea of them has been around a very long time. Did you know that 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? Ten years later, 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). 

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.” Today people are surprised by a story circulating  in Social Media that in 1963 a newspaper called “The Mansfield News Journal”, published this story,

You‘ll Be Able to Carry a Phone In your Pocket In Future.

“Someday, Manfielders 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 phones of the future include a kitchen loud-speaking telephone and a visual Image telephone.

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

The visual image telephone allows the parties to converse by way of a microphone and a loudspeaker while a miniature television camera transmits the image. The TV phone will have a written signature transmission system and a conventional tape recorder

The new phones are being displayed at the Home and Flower Show at the Colosseum.”

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. 

The idea of video phones (also mentioned in the above-displayed 1963 article) can be traced back much to the 1930s. This is why we learn from history.