A mobile phone ad recorded in the 1940s was recently uncovered by Open Culture. This ad shows a working mobile phone system years before the iPhone or the great business phones of the ’80s.
The ad begins by trying to explain the benefits of being able to communicate on the go.
“Here comes a trailer truck on the open highway miles from the nearest town,” the narrator says, focusing on selling phones to businesses. “Let’s say it’s important for someone to get in touch with the drivers of this team. How can this be done?”
Later, two colleagues have a rather casual conversation about picking up items from a local warehouse while demonstrating a miracle of modern technology. The ad continues with another example of how helpful it is to be able to talk to someone when your car breaks down.
The narrator said, “This is a mobile phone service. In this service, conversations are made partly by radio and partly by telephone lines,” he says. “To reach vehicles traveling on inter-urban highways, a series of transmitting and receiving stations connected to telephone lines are placed at intervals along the highway, within range of the vehicle in motion. Antennas are preferably placed on high ground, as the range of high-frequency waves is limited to the line of sight.”
The first call made through the system was made on October 2, 1946, via a Motorola Automobile Radiotelephone. Operated by the Bell Telephone Company, the service quickly reached capacity due to the small number of radio frequencies it had. There was also a high tendency for the system to interfere with conversations, meaning you could find yourself in a conversation with a different person than the person you started talking to while driving on the highway.
An article on the Bell system in 1979 stated, “Although the signal level on a channel is weak beyond 25 miles [40 kilometers], it will significantly interfere with other mobile communications on the same frequency within 60 to 100 miles [100 to 160 kilometers] of the ground transmitter. as high,” he said.
The system existed until the 1980s before being replaced by cellular service.
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