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Cell phones have a remarkably long history, going all the way back to the photophones of none other than Alexander Graham Bell himself, gadgets that transmitted sound waves on light beams. No, really! Wireless telephony goes back to 1880, believe it or not, when on June 3 the world’s first ever telephone message was sent over Bell’s photophone. Unfortunately, the technology was easily foiled by common outdoors phenomena such as clouds and so the world would have to wait until the development of radiophones many years later.
In fact, cell phones operate on radio waves, and hence are nothing more than radiophones themselves in many respects. It was during World War II that such devices really took off, though it wasn’t until the 1970s that hand-held phones became available for civilian use. The first commercial automated cellular network was introduced in Japan in 1979 for use by metropolitan Tokyo, and within just five years grown to offer nationwide coverage, the first country to enjoy wireless services. All of Scandinavia followed suit in 1981, with Chicago, United States of America coming online in 1983. The rest of the decade saw the United Kingdom, Canada, and Mexico adopting wireless services in turn.
“Modern,” or Second Generation (2G), technology became popular only in the 1990s, however. At the beginning, the global subscriber base numbered only just under twelve and a half million people. Twenty years later, over four and a half billion people enjoyed wireless telephony worldwide. 3G speeds and capabilities became available in 2001, and now 4G technology is being applied – all a far cry from the early days of veritable bricks weighing several pounds that could only deal with analog calls!
Certainly, modern cell phones are not even phones anymore, to judge by the number of jobs they typically perform. They play games and music and take photos and shoot video, just for starters. People also use them to “text” or write short instant messages to one another, and many are capable of surfing the web as well. In fact, the feasible range of uses for a cell phone seems to keep growing, such that they are now even capable of providing one’s location in most major urban centers around the world!
And so they have been more justifiably called “smartphones” instead. And perhaps the day is soon coming when the convergence device, the do-it-all vision of futurists from the 1990s, will be an exact reality, a veritable holy grail of electrical engineers that will is ultraportable and ultra-powerful. Can superintelligence be far behind?
Indeed, the day will come when brain-computer interfacing will make us ourselves the convergence devices we seek to create! And then can collective intelligence and telepathy be far behind that?