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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Portable Telephone | ||
| The essence of a cell phone. |
Matt Dodson is walking with a friend.
| "Say, your telephone is sounding."
"Oh!" Matt fumbled in his pouch and got out his phone. "Hello?" "That you, son?" came his father's voice. |
| Technovelgy from Space Cadet,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Scribner's Sons in 1948 Additional resources -
|
Another interesting feature of this passage is that it is the friend who hears the cell phone, not the owner of the phone. How many times have you had to point out to someone that their phone was going off?
Heinlein fans should also note the "pommel phone" in his excellent 1951 novel Between Planets:
Lazy twitched his shoulder muscles and snorted. Don reached for the pommel, removed the phone, and answered. "Mobile 6-J-233309, Don Harvey speaking."
See also the pocketphone from Heinlein's 1953 novel Assignment in Eternity. In this novel, he coins a better name.
As far as I know, the first reference to a pocket-sized telephone occurs in John Jones's Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler, published in The Black Cat magazine in 1915; see the pocket wireless phone.
A few hundred yards further on Lazy [the horse] shied again, not from a snake this time but from an unexpected noise. Don pulled him in and spoke severely. "You bird-brained butterball! When are you going to learn not to jump when the telephone rings?"
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'The observation vehicle was of that peculiar variety used in conveying a large number of people across rough terrain.'
'The real border was defended by... a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.'
'I ... set my automatic astronomical instruments to searching for a habitable planet.'
'...haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?'
'... oblongs were all over the floor and surfaces.'
