Future sounds

40 years ago today, the first mobile phone call was made. Now we talk, text and play games on tiny little computers we can hold in our hands. Amazing! And all of this from the sound of a twanging clock spring back on June 2, 1875, heard by Alexander Graham Bell over a wire.

Then, on March 10, 1876, the famous first words were heard. Bell’s voice came out of a device saying “Mr. Watson…come here…I want to see you.”

Then, almost 100 years later, the wires disappeared after Martin Cooper made the first mobile phone call on April 3, 1973. He worked for Motorola and he rang his rival at AT&T to tell him his company had beaten him to mobile telephony.

Martin’s phone, of course, was gigantic but it was the beginning of everything we see today on every street, in buses and cars, outside restaurants, everywhere. As I said, amazing.

Sometime in the 1940’s, my mother and her best friend, set up a personal telephone system between their two bedrooms. It consisted of two tin cans and a length of taut string and was stretched between the two houses.

There is some conjecture about which of my mother’s three brothers climbed up on the roof to set the system up in the first place, but it was definitely there, it worked and they used it to communicate when they were ready to go out. It was, clearly, the pre-war equivalent of mobile technology…possibly the first Facebook with regular status updates (“Are you ready?“,”Not yet“, I’ll call back in five minutes then“, “Roger, Roger.“).

The technology may have become a little more complex (you could always text on a tin can if you knew Morse code) but the need to communicate over distance has always been socially necessary.

What next?