Readers of a certain age may remember a classic American Express advertising campaign from the 1970s. As reported in [1], the line “Don’t leave home without it” got its start “in a series of ads where a fedora wearing Karl Malden warned about the dangers of carrying cash instead of American Express Travelers Cheques.” Well, those traveler’s checks have gone the way of VHS players, but one product “introduced” in the 1970s has conquered the world in the last 50 years.
According to a report on CNN [2], it was on 3 April 1973 that “Martin Cooper stood on a sidewalk on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan with a device the size of a brick and made the first public call from a cell phone to one of the men he’d been competing with to develop the device. ‘I’m calling you on a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a personal, handheld, portable cell phone,’ Cooper, then an engineer at Motorola, said on the phone to Joel Engel, head of AT&T-owned Bell Labs.” Manufacturing issues and federal regulatory processes had delayed the availability of cell phones to the public for a decade, when a version of that DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) phone, which weighed 2.5 lb and was about a foot tall, hit the market for a hefty US$3,900. It took another decade before cell phones became really practical in terms of size and weight, but since then the technology has seen a phenomenal growth, with some 97% of Americans owning a cell phone of some kind [2].
If you asked millennials about the one product they would not leave home without, it would undoubtedly be their cell phones [3]. In any restaurant, it is a common sight these days to see a group of young people sitting around a table, not looking at their menus or talking to one another, but scrolling through their smartphones and dispatching a flurry of emojis. How did young people of earlier generations communicate with one other without these gadgets? As the 18 April 2023 entry in my daily Forgotten English calendar [4] reminded me, “more than a hundred messages could be telegraphed by women [in 18th century England] based on the movement of her fan, body position and actions. For instance, covering the left ear with an open fan said, ‘Please keep this a secret,’ while striking anything with a fan indicated that the woman was becoming impatient” [4].
Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first portable cell phone, told CNN [2] that “too many engineers are wrapped up in what they call technology and the gadgets, the hardware, and they forget that the whole purpose of technology is to make peoples’ lives better. People forget that, and I have to keep reminding them. We are trying to improve the human experience. That’s what technology is all about.” So from fans to cell phones, what has not changed is the fundamental human need to communicate. Any guesses on how we will be meeting that need 50 years from now?
I would like to thank my Committee on Man and Radiation (COMAR) colleague Ken Foster for posting a link to the CNN story on the COMAR listserve.
[1] F. Ulrich, “Don’t launch a global brand campaign without it,” Media Logic, Jun. 2018. Accessed: May 9, 2023. [Online] . Available: https://www.medialogic.com/blog/financial-services-marketing/american-express-brand-campaign/
[2] J. Korn, “50 years ago, he made the first cell phone call,” CNN, Apr. 2023. Accessed: May 9, 2023. [Online] . Available: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/03/tech/cell-phone-turns-50/index.html
[3] M. Casciano, “Millennials can’t live without these 10 relatable life essentials, TBH,” Elite Daily, May 2019. [Online] . Available: https://www.elitedaily.com/p/10-things-millennials-cant-live-without-because-theyre-essential-to-living-your-bestlife-17869861
[4] J. Kacirk, Forgotten English (a Daily Calendar). South Portland, ME, USA: Sellers Publishing, 2023.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAP.2023.3280842