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"I'm a farm boy. It's very interesting; you can detect self-starting characteristics in this society and they are strongest among people who have had some kind of rural upbringing and a very impressionable stage."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| 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. |
| 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.
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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'Noiselessly, on rubber-tired wheels, they journeyed...'
'He immediately turned the small shining disc of the Language Rectifier..'
'The delicious, indescribable pleasure of being a little planet swinging through space...'
'The horse reared up, pawing the air, then sprang into a gallop.'
'...most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives.'
'So what we're looking for now is... an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug.'
'With the Scarab as big as a beetle, I could make a Scarab as big as a sand grain.'
'The doctor was a line of machines with a conveyor belt running through them.'
