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Pocket Phone (or pocketphone)
A telephone that is not hard wired to the network; a mobile or cell phone. (Read the full article)
| "You list pocketphone for PODKAYNE OF MARS (1963). One of the characters in SPACE CADET (1948) carried a pocketphone. Thanks
" ( 4/17/2004 9:27:36 PM ) |
| "...still looking for the quote on that one - help, anyone?" (Bill Christensen 4/18/2004 11:57:10 AM ) |
| "I'll try to remember to look it up for you, but the scene is when the main character (Don?) arrives for Space Patrol testing and first meets "Tex" Jarman. He takes a call from his father who inquires about his recently repaired leg. (Tex mentions that he packed his phone in his luggage in order to avoid calls from his family.)" ( 5/25/2004 2:35:27 PM ) |
| "The quote you are looking for in Space Cadet is:
[Tex says] "... 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."
...
Incidently, it is in the same passage (the first couple of pages of Space Cadet) that Heinlein refers to Slidewalks. " (Al 11/28/2004 2:41:47 AM ) |
| "Actually the first mention of a portable phone is a bit earlier than that, in Heinlein's "Waldo", from 1942 I think. The phones there use beamed power and one of the issues in the story is the radiation hazards they pose.
(Here's the material from Waldo - 'Radio telephony could not replace wired telephony until ultra micro-wave techniques made room in the ether, so to speak, for the traffic load. Even then it was necessary to invent a tuning device which could be used by a nontechnical person, a ten-year-old child, let us say,as easily as the dial selector which was characteristic of the commercial wired telephone of the era then terminating. Bell Laboratories cracked that problem... He might even recall his first independent-unit radiotelephone with its somewhat disconcerting double dial. He had gotten a lawyer in Buenos Aires on it when attempting to reach his neighbourhood delicatessen. For two weeks he made all his local calls by having them relayed back from South America before he discovered that it made a difference which dial he used first.' I'll put it in the index, but I see this as a continuation of the idea of a bulky radiotelephone, as opposed to a true pocket-sized cellphone.)" (michael 7/8/2005 4:54:21 AM ) |
| "Erich Kästner (German author) made mention of mobile phones in 1931 already in "Der 35. Mai oder Konrad reitet in die Südsee" ("The 35th of May, or Conrad's ride to the South Seas"). In a futuristic town called "Elektropolis" (Electropolis) a man takes out a phone handset from his coat, while on the street, and tells his wife that he will be late for supper. JFTR." ( 7/23/2005 4:33:30 AM ) |
| "Heinlein's earliest mention of a pocket phone occurs in his short story "-We Also Walk Dogs" which appeared in ASTOUNDING in July 1941.
"Grace Cormet's telephone buzzed. She took it out of her pocket and said, 'Yes?' . . . . She cut off and shoved the little instrument savagely back into her pocket."" (Ed Wysocki 9/28/2005 4:30:38 PM ) |
| "GSM and GPRS cellphones now run at 1.8 and 1.9 Ghz, 3G phones are higher still.
Live Long and Prosper" (Lazarus 1/17/2006 5:48:58 AM ) |
| "In "Between Planets" (1941), on the first page, I think, the hero is riding his pony out in the New Mexico desert and his cell phone rings. He answers it with a long code number (which IMO is silly because one would really just say, "Hello?") ... I don't have this book now but I think it also mentions microwave relay towers. " (KateMcL 12/6/2008 1:27:49 PM ) |
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