Bell Telephone launched a mobile phone during the 1940s | Hacker News Reader

Bell Telephone launched a mobile phone during the 1940s

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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.

Is that the same thing as "party lines"? I'm curious how many channels they could operate at once.

No it was like a CB radio over a large city or area. There were only a handful of channels. It wasn't a "cell" phone. It was like a walkie talkie. The cell part came later.

Or maybe like farmers using electrified barbed-wire fences to chat? Like Claude Shannon used in his youth! Came across this in a bio on Shannon I read recently. And here we are now.

Now that sounds like telegraph

IMTS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improved_Mobile_Telephone_Serv...

We used to hack the local system as a youth and make free calls.

That does not sound like a cellular system. Mobile telephone systems predated cellular services, which support automated roaming between cells. Pre-cellular systems just talked to a nearby tower and the call would end if one drove out of range.

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#...

Sounds like it was ultimately deployed in 30 Russian cities in the 1960s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altai_(mobile_telephone_system...

It doesn't say how much it costs or why it died though.

Russian-language version of that article has more details. It's been widely used until early 90s by taxists, bus drivers, firefighters, emergency services, etc, but was unencrypted and had too little capacity for individual use, and also no possibility for billing. It wasn't a handheld device either.

The replacement was in the plans, but the Soviet Union crashed and there was no money to develop the new system, so everyone just switched to GSM.

Wild guess and it's too late to find sources, but phones in the Eastern block were a highly political thing and access to landlines was strictly controlled.

So maybe there was no incentive to scale a mobile solution that worked for the elite and basic services.

This is the (traditional to...) transformation of reality into something else. Both of the characters listed in Wikipedia have absolutely nothing to do with orthogonal codes and so on. Unfortunately, Wikipedia can be edited for other purposes than information access freedom.

One of the first projects I worked on at Bell Labs back in the day, was a replacement for IMTS called HCMTS, High Capacity Mobile Telephone Service, later renamed AMPS, the original analog cellular technology. I was 2 years old at the time (joke, I am old ;) What was interesting is that during the break up of the Bell System, no one wanted the technology because the marketing research estimated that something like 150,000 people nationally wanted it. But they asked the question the wrong way, people were thinking of it like the old expensive IMTS, not something you could hold in your hand. That came later. It reminded me a lot of Kodak letting digital photography go because the early versions were klunky, and they thought it would never take off. Classic story in tech.

Kodak was actually an innovator and market leader in early digital photography. But they failed to keep up with other camera vendors and didn't get into the camera phone business.

Pardon my ignorance, but I guess I have a few questions. Wouldn't the hand-held nature be more dependent on batteries and technology than on the network technology? NiMH batteries weren't really commercial until 1989 and NiCd batteries have disadvantages. Likewise, advances in chips mean less space usage for many things.

I'm kinda surprised that AMPS uses so much less spectrum. From Wikipedia, it seems to indicate 0.5-1MHz (compared to 30kHz for AMPS). Was it just that radio equipment wasn't as good back then so you needed a lot of spacing in addition to the 30kHz voice signal? Something else?

It also seems like a big part of it would be making the tower spacing closer. The 0.6-3W AMPS signals at 800MHz wouldn't travel as far as the 25 watts for IMTS operating at 35-460MHz, yes? It seems like part of AMPS was betting on a large investment in infrastructure that would allow lower-power devices which would allow for smaller devices because of smaller batteries, yes?

Sorry to bombard you with questions, but I'm just curious about what things might have been trade-offs (like investing in more towers to allow smaller batteries) and what things might have been technology advances (like radios that could discriminate signals better requiring less spacing or new battery types).

I think the channel spacing with IMTS and AMPS was the same, there was just a lot more spectrum available at higher frequencies. AMPS was allocated 50MHz shared between two competing providers. IMTS I believe only used about 1.5MHz, although the specific frequencies it used were different in different areas.

I think that you're right that it's sort of a cascade of things that made AMPS possible.

1. You get the capacity from having a lot of towers with a wide bandwdith, but you have to pay for all of them, so you have to use the capacity, so you need demand.

2. You get the demand because with the higher capacity, the price can come down.

3. You also get the demand because you can have a truly mobile device, not just a car phone.

4. To have enough demand though, the price of the handset also needs to be low enough. The prices of the integrated circuits to make a handset came down dramatically between 1970 and 1985 or so when AMPS started to be widely deployed.

The electronics necessary to make an AMPS handset are also more sophisticated because (again to keep the service cost down) you need automated dialing (no operator), and you need to be able to hand the call off to the next cell if the user is moving. This means you need a microcontroller to be able to handle the pretty big state machine of the overall system.

Yeah, pretty much none of that is what mattered really. Making a phone small enough to fit in a pocket or purse meant all digital even for voice. that came with 3G but the brick showed the way.

Just getting back here. There were a number of things that made the hand-held possible and yes, not related to the network really except that, the cellular approach meant that you needed a microprocessor in the phone to handle the channel hopping and you of course needed cheap processors at the cell site to manage the radios and control channels. All of that was stuff that came after IMTS was developed. If you disassemble a brick phone, most of it is battery and heat sink. The thing that made thin phones possible came later, that was digital technology which mean the radio could be switched on and off as packets got sent and received a technology called DRX, discontinuous reception, that came with 3G later on. The exact frequencies used is sort of irrelevant TBH, that all just has to do with propagation and path loss which just changes the various engineering parameters like cell spacing and so forth. The thing that got people hooked on cell phones was that you could carry it around. That was the game changer. I have a slide deck where I do on cellular latencies, I show a picture of a brick phone and say, this was the wireless device with the lowest latency in history. Meaning, it was on all the time when connect. Something that changed with digital. But being able to shut things down in between bursts of packets is what made the dainty phones possible :)

Kodak was a chemical company, not a camera company. Stop using this analogy.

So was Fujifilm and they still exist and have a successful line of digital cameras

And Xerox was a photocopy company and not a computer company right? /s

Nokia was a paper mill company. Not sure what you're trying to say.

The point is, Ma Bell, the original AT&T, was a long distance company. That was their cash cow. That was their mind set. So the basically gave cellular away. Same thing as Kodak, they saw themselves as a chemical company not a photography company.

Truth is, ma bell should have thought of themselves as a telecommunications compay.

Exact same mistake.

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! :-/

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.

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.

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.

There was a working version of it at Disneyland.

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.

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

the thing that bothers me about video chat is the live video of myself in the corner. I find it incredibly distracting

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/

I was wondering the same thing, perhaps this was a government funded project?

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.

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.

Wait until you hear about when the first practical battery electric car was developed...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car

Or the first transatlantic cable..

Or that the Fax machine predates the telephone by 32 years

Alexander Bain invented a fax machine in 1843, Morse invented the telephone in 1875.

The Andy Griffith Show ran from 1960-1968.

That's wild. Thanks for the clarification

More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Telephone_Service

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.

Maybe the marine operator would call you, and then they'd patch you through to the landline?

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.

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.

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.

This entire video is HAM repeater patches[1] with different automation.

One key thing to note in the video is that placing a call to the mobile unit required knowing in advance what cell the unit would be in.

On the upside, they could ring a particular unit, meaning there must be a codewheel in the mobile unit to selective ring just that one, which is pretty sophisticated. That's roughly as complicated as doing pulse dialing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopatch

I was going to say, this looks like patching. My dad was doing this in the 70's (in the car) I believe.

The codes were five digits, and transmitted as FM dial pulses on 600 and 1500 cycles. The receiver had a toothed ratchet wheel with five pins that would follow the dial pulses. It was entirely electromechanical.

In NZ in the early 80s there was a "RadPhone" service for recreational boaters over VHF --- you could call the Coast Guard operator on a dedicated VHF channel, give them a phone number, and they'd make the call and connect it to that channel. Of course everyone else with a VHF radio could listen in.

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.

By ”single duplex” do you mean simplex (versus a single duplex channel, which would allow simultaneous 2-way communication)?

I think it's more "half duplex" - either side can transmit, but over a single channel so only one at a time.

In that video, the phones were used by the passenger of a moving vehicle, or the vehicle was stopped. No drivers were on their phones!!! Please remember that when you are driving your car.

When did we stop calling things radios and start calling them mobile phones?

Probably with the transition from analog to digital.

Digital phones are still relatively new

It was much, much earlier than that - analog car or suitcase phones were well known before digital arrived. It was a trope in 80s movies or TV to have someone use one since it meant they were rich and/or important.

My assumption is that the nomenclature came from buying one from the phone company. There were other radios around but they weren’t interoperable with the phone network.

I remember using analog cell phones, and everyone called them cell phones (or cellular phones).

Probably when we could make calls to and from regular phone numbers from portable phones.

As a Bell Labs fanboy this is one of my favorite bits of trivia. They invented the future a long, long time ago.

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.

It was a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_%28telecommunications%2...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT2

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Handy-phone_System

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).

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.

iirc GSM killed it. Analog cell phone existed long prior.

This page has tons of detailed info about old (1946 and on) car phones, including lots of photos: https://www.wb6nvh.com/Carphone.htm

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

Some of the best music ever committed to a TV series was on that show. Musically, it's the 50s' WKRP In Cincinnati.

Thanks

I'm old enough to remember Cannon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_(TV_series)#Props

I think we lost something when we lost that accent for news.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

If you like this, you may also enjoy:

Dial Comes to Town (also 1940s)

https://youtu.be/p45T7U5oi9Q

1939 First Motorola Two-Way Radio

In 1939 Galvin Manufacturing Corporation introduced its first Motorola two-way radio. Public safety officers used the radio to transmit and receive voice communications from their cars.

From A Timeline Overview of Motorola History - 1928—2008

https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/6800_MotDoc.pdf

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.

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.

Back in the USENET days it was pretty common knowledge if you took a Bearcat 200XLT and removed a resistor you could tune into the analog cellular frequencies.

http://textfiles.com/hamradio/MODIFICATIONS/bc200xlt.txt

It worked pretty well although it was half duplex so you only heard one side of the conversation. Sometimes the speaker bled into the mic and you could hear a little more.

In the 90s, someone gave me a prototype mobile carphone system that you would set up outside your home, and hooked up to your landline. The car would then radio back to your home.

It was quite polished and looked like a production unit, but sadly I didn't keep anything. This familiar to anyone?

On a related note: the fax machine dates to the 1840s — that's earlier than the Pony Express.

The talking on the phone bit at the beginning reminds me of Erlang, The Movie: https://youtu.be/xrIjfIjssLE?t=205

Loved the view of the units that were installed in the cars. And yet 40 years later AT&T largely divested from the next generation of mobile telephony, handheld wireless, just as the market was about to take off.

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?

It looks like they had to try a general area (like "Centerville").

To know that it's for a particular phone is easy, just have some tones that identify the intended recipient, and the phone will only ring if the tones match.

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

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.

Ah thanks, makes sense.

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.

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.

But not Telephone.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/spread-answering-m...

I'm not really sure anyone counts "Smithsonian Magazine" as a source.

Yeah, merely calling them a “source” would be an understatement of SI’s significance.

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.

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.

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.

The government could tap phone lines willy-nilly until 1967[1], regardless of whether any third-party's ability to listen to a conversation.

Plus, the fact that any non-government person could surreptitiously record a conversation, and that recording be useable in court, didn't substantially change until this century, and even today it's mostly a mishmash of state laws preventing such disclosures, those laws are inconsistent, and in some states there's still effectively little preventing that from occurring. And the ability of the government to leverage third-parties to get around 4th Amendment precedent is still in flux.

All-in-all, I would think the ability, and knowledge of the ability, to record a phone call was entirely irrelevant and uninteresting in the 1940s, at least regarding people's expectations of privacy. But I'm curious if there's evidence to the contrary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States

We know that now because information is available at our fingertips and we’re nerds. The average person doesn’t know that.

At the time, AT&T’s marketing was all about trust, a mission ethos to serve humanity, etc. They also had a close relationship with government at all levels. Their goal was to avoid awkward questions.

My father told me about this. Mexican senators had it in their cars.

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