Bell Telephone Launched a Mobile Phone During the 1940s: Watch Bell’s Film Showing How It Worked

“Here comes a trail­er truck out on the open high­way, miles from the near­est town,” says the nar­ra­tor of the short film above. Sud­den­ly, it becomes “impor­tant for some­one to get in touch with the dri­vers of this out­fit. How can it be done?” Any mod­ern-day view­er would respond to this ques­tion in the same way: you just call the guys. But Mobile Tele­phones dates from the nine­teen-for­ties, well before the epony­mous devices were in wide use — about four decades, in fact, before even the mas­sive Motoro­la DynaT­AC 8000X came on the mar­ket. The idea of call­ing some­one not at home or the office, let alone a truck­er on the road, would have seemed the stuff of sci­ence fic­tion.

Yet the engi­neers at Bell had made it pos­si­ble, using a sys­tem that trans­mits con­ver­sa­tions “part­way by radio, part­way by tele­phone lines.” This neces­si­tat­ed “a num­ber of trans­mit­ting and receiv­ing sta­tions con­nect­ed to tele­phone lines,” installed “at inter­vals along the high­way so that one will always be in range of the mov­ing vehi­cle.”

As dra­ma­tized in Mobile Tele­phones, the process of actu­al­ly ring­ing up the dri­ver of a vehi­cle involves call­ing a clas­sic for­ties switch­board oper­a­tor and ask­ing her to make the con­nec­tion. But oth­er­wise, the process won’t feel entire­ly unfa­mil­iar to the mobile phone users today — that is, to the major­i­ty of the peo­ple in the world.

Cell­phones have become such an inte­gral part of life in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry that few of us real­ly feel the need to under­stand just how they work. But three quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry ago, the idea of tak­ing or mak­ing calls on the go was unfa­mil­iar enough that view­ers of a film like this would have want­ed the mechan­ics laid out in some detail. Sure­ly that held espe­cial­ly true for the indus­tri­al clients of Bel­l’s ear­ly mobile-tele­phone sys­tem, for whom its reli­able func­tion­al­i­ty would trans­late into greater prof­its. Tak­ing the longer view, this tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment marks, as the nar­ra­tor reminds us over swelling music, “one more step toward tele­phone ser­vice for any­one, any time, any­where”: a once-futur­is­tic vision that now sounds prac­ti­cal­ly mun­dane.

Relat­ed con­tent:

“When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones”: A 1920s Com­ic Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts Our Cell­phone-Dom­i­nat­ed Lives

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vin­tage Film

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

In 1953, a Tele­phone-Com­pa­ny Exec­u­tive Pre­dicts the Rise of Mod­ern Smart­phones and Video Calls

The First Cell­phone: Dis­cov­er Motorola’s DynaT­AC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.