He first iPhone was announced in January 2007. Currently, the 80% of the population global uses smart mobile phones. And some say we glance at our phones an average of 200 times a day. It is clear that the smartphone has become an appendage for many. A device that we must wear at all times because, let’s be honest, it works for everything. and who would predict the future we live in with smartphones replacing dozens of other forgotten devices?
Actually, many saw that future. You don’t have to be a genius either. In the case of mobile phones and/or smartphonesone only had to look at similar technologies to see that if the telegraph had lost its threads, the bakelite phones that hung from the walls and that later formed part of the decoration of millions of homes would end up lose cord that accompanied them to be wireless. Or mobile. And if the gigantic computers were getting smaller until they could fit on an office table, why not think that they would end up fitting in one hand?
This article talks about two of those predictions. Which may look obvious today but at the time they looked crazy. You have to know how to connect the dots of our reality to predict the future. But it was also kind of crazy send machines into space and we have probes sending us pictures of remote places. And although we have already gotten used to it and we see it as something natural, looking for something in an open database of global reach As the internet is, it was something that was only conceived in the science fiction of great figures such as Isaac Asimov.
Predict the future of communications
Human beings have always wanted communicate at a distance. With smoke signals, with fire, light or with flags and other visual elements that could be peek for miles away. There are many inventions of this type that different civilizations have been developing. since ancient times with capital letters. One of them was the optical telegraph, which I already talked about before.
This happened to him electric telegraphwhich sent pulses through wires, which greatly expedited the sending of information. You no longer needed to look into the distance and decipher the meaning of colored flags or strategically placed sticks. Now you received pulses that were translated into letters, words, phrases… All with the help of the Morse code. First tested in 1844. The telegraph is the great invention of the 19th century. It was first patented in 1837. First wired, then integrated into the railway network and, later, wireless.
Also worth mentioning is the first radio transmission Marconi in 1879, which made it possible to send and receive voice through the electromagnetic waves what is in nature. And three years earlier, in 1876, Graham Bell He patented the telephone, a device that allowed voice and sound to be sent through copper wires.
Nikola Tesla predicted the mobile phone in 1926
In this context we meet the electrical engineer, mechanic and inventor Nicholas Tesla. Of Serbian origin, although born in present-day Croatia, then the Austrian Empire, he soon immigrated to the United States. he worked for Edison one season and beyond was by itself developing technologies and devices such as alternating current, the induction motor and other patents that were bought by Westinghouse Electricthose responsible for the Elektro robot.
very given to announce revolutionary inventions even before creating them, Nicholas Tesla knew Attract attention of the press and interviews of him frequently appeared in newspapers of the time. It is precisely in one of these interviews that Tesla talks about the mobile phone. The interview appears published on January 30, 1926 in the magazine Collier’s, published monthly and sold throughout the United States. In it, Tesla ventures to predict the future on various subjects. And one of them is wireless telephonywhich would not become a commercial product until 1973.
Tesla’s Futuristic Predictions
Specifically, Tesla came to say that “when the wireless technology is perfectly applied, the entire Earth will become a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We will can communicate with each other instantly, regardless of distance. Not only that, but through television and telephone we will see and hear each other as perfectly as if we were face to face, despite the distances of thousands of kilometers; and the instruments through which we can do it will be amazingly simple compared to our current phone. A man will carry one in your pocket of his vest.”
From his words we can extract mentions to the mobile phone but also to the internet, to video calls and, why, to the very smartphones that we all carry in our pockets. And in the context of the time, he also cites the radio and the television as means of information in real time. Unlike the paper press, more widespread at that time.
Mansfield Telephone and telephones in 1963
And of the well-known Nicholas Tesla we went to the not so well known American town of Mansfield, in Ohio. On a distant Thursday, April 18, 1963, the city newspaper, the Mansfield News-Journal, published local news that would reach the world in later decades. And it is that a clipping of that news has been circulating in a more or less viral way during the last decade because it manages to predict the future we live in today.
Specifically, the news mentions Mansfield Telephone Company, the phone company that served this and other cities you may not have heard of either. The news headline says something like “In the future you will be able to carry phone in pocket”. The piece, a brief that barely occupies one seventh of the page, appears first in the upper left corner. And it is illustrated with a photograph.
Your caption says that Jean Conradcommercial representative of Mansfield Telephone Co., holds in his hand a pocket cordless phone that readers will one day be able to carry with them. The photo caption clarifies that “the phone is still under development and that it will come to us in a distant future”.
Mobile phones and video calls
As the text of the news explains, in the laboratories of the aforementioned telephone company, they were working on this type of device. A foldable pocket phone about which we know little but which reminds us of the clamshell mobile phones that became popular in the 90s and 2000s. And that, in a certain way, they are coming back with the folding screens that various manufacturers have been marketing for some time now.
The text also talks about built-in kitchen phones to talk to someone inside or outside the home (which could well be the current smart speakers with Alexa and Siri) and picture phones to integrate a small TV camera (video calls).
Although we can verify that these 1963 predictions have come true, the reason for this promotional news was the presence of this telephone company at a public event called Home and Flower Show, a space in which to make yourself known, get new clients and advertise. A local version of the world futuristic fairs that we have seen in previous articles and where large companies of that time imagined the future.