Rajeev Bansal
Readers of a certain age may remember a classic American Express advertising campaign from the seventies. 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 Traveler’s Cheques.” Well, those Traveler’s Cheques have gone the way of VHS players, but one product “introduced” in the seventies has conquered the world in the last fifty years.
According to a report on CNN [2], it was on April 3, 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 delayed the availability of cell phones to the public for a decade, when a version of that DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) phone, weighing 2.5 pounds and about a foot tall, hit the market for a hefty US$3,900. It took another decade before the 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 a millennial 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 April 18, 2023 entry in my daily Forgotten English calendar [4] reminded me, “more than a hundred messages could be telegraphed by women [in the eighteenth 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 how we will be meeting that need fifty years from now?
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this column appeared originally in the August 2023 issue of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine.
I would like to thank my COMAR (Committee on Man and Radiation) 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. Accessed: May 9, 2023. [Online] . Available: https://www.medialogic.com/blog/financial-services-marketing/american-express-brand-campaign/
[2] J. Korn, “Fifty 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/MMM.2023.3284728