For example, via mobile phone truck drivers could keep in touch with head office, and journalists as quickly as possible breaking news pass it on to their colleagues.
That took a lot of space and energy in the beginning, writes technology magazine Today’s Engineer: the telephone system weighed about 40 kilos and took up most of the luggage space. When the phone rang, it required so much power that the headlights went out.
It cost also a small fortune: 15 dollars subscription costs per month, converted to the current exchange rate about 175 euros. Plus about 35 cents per call (now more than 4 euros). In 1948 there were about 5,000 American users, making about 30,000 calls per week. Only a few users in each city could call mobile at the same time, the rest had to wait their turn.
In 1973 it really became mobile
Still, it is debatable whether you can really see this as the beginning of mobile telephony, says analyst and mobile phone expert Tim Wijkman of Telecompaper. “It was actually a form of radio, you already had it in army vehicles at that time. In principle, it could also be listened to, for everyone who had the equipment for it.” In the beginning you couldn’t simultaneously talk on the car phone, you had to talk or listen – just like with a walkie-talkie.
With the real start of mobile telephony, Wijkman rather thinks of the spring day in 1973 (April 3, to be precise) when Motorola project leader Marty Cooper made a teasing phone call from a sidewalk in New York to the major competitors of Bell Labs, who were also developing consumer mobile phones.
Cooper reminisces about that moment:
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