The Curious History of the Car Phone

The car phone had an indelible impact on our modern life, and its journey began before you may think. 

"Fuel for the Future" is presented by State Farm Insurance and driven by America’s Automotive Trust. Learn more at americasautomotivetrust.org

Episode Transcript

(00:05):
Your smartphone has a long
standing relationship with cars.
Todaywe're diving into the curious history
of the car phone, a gadget that promisedto revolutionize communication
but ended up shaping much morethan just phone calls from the car.
It's shaped our entire modern existence.
The car phone's journeyfrom a bulky apparatus

(00:27):
in the trunk of a car to the sleekhandheld computers of today.
Paints a vivid pictureof the evolution of technology.
we can only speculateabout its impact on the future.
But we know our lives today are shapedmore by mobile communication
than anything else.
This is fuel for the future.
Presented by State Farm Insuranceand driven by America's Automotive Trust.

(00:50):
I'm Michael May.
to understand the car phone,we have to go back to the beginning.
And it's surprisingly farther in thepast than you might think.
as cars became the
common mode of transportationin the early 20th century.
People were already thinking of waysto add radios or phones to cars.

(01:11):
There's mention of a man around 1910who invented a phone
that could attach to telephone lineson the side of the road, but a driver
would have to stop to use this device,which isn't very efficient.
And there's debatethat this device ever actually worked.
In 1920, McFarlandcreated a car communication device,
but it was realistically more akinto a radio that used a telephone handset.

(01:36):
I'm sure other inventors tried their handat crafting
workable modelsin the first half of the 20th century.
But the real first car phonewith a mobile telephone service
came about in 1946.
In the place Saint Louis, Missouri.
This is where Bell Labs
and AT&T manufacturing subsidiary WesternElectric had worked more than a decade

(02:00):
on what was called the Mobile TelephoneService, or MTS, for short.
the way it worked.
A car phone, which was calledan auto phone, manufactured
by Galvin Manufacturing Corporation,now known as Motorola,
would connect to the MTSusing a series of radio towers.
Now, this is not really likethe cellular networks we know today.

(02:22):
In fact, the technology was so limited
that a single towercould only handle three calls at once.
and if a caller leftthat area of the tower,
their call would be disconnected.
But on June 17th of 1946,
the first calls were made from cars.
And the first onecame from inside a Chrysler.

(02:45):
These car phones were installed,usually on the center console.
And they looked at
just like what rotary phones at homewould have been at the time.
in October of that year.
The service was set up in Chicago,but again
it was limitedto a small number of callers at once.
and the equipment requiredfor these early car phones was massive.
And my car phone weighed about 80 poundsand took up nearly

(03:07):
the entire trunk of a car.
However, by 1948,
wireless telephone service was availablein almost 100 cities.
The main customers included truck fleetoperators, reporters, utility services.
Basically, the standard set of workersthat require communication
while away from a desk or an office,

(03:28):
But the service only had 5000
customers making 30,000 calls a week.
Now, that number might sound high,but compared to the population
at the time, carphones were still quite rare and unique.
Plus, they weren't cheap.
Service cost $15 a month, plus 30 to $0.40
per local call,which is roughly around $200 today.

(03:51):
And that doesn'teven include the installation price.
By the 1950s, car phones were onlya luxury for the wealthy and powerful.
If you had a car phone,you weren't just making calls.
You were making a statement.
One of the most famous early usersof the car phone, Frank Sinatra.
According to anecdotes, Old BlueEyes loved to impress guests

(04:12):
by making calls from his car.
And this luxury didn't mean convenience.
Early car phone users had to relyon operators to connect their calls.
The MTS mobile telephone service,which expanded to over 100 cities
by the late1950s, was still really clunky,
with only a few hundred frequenciesavailable nationwide,

(04:34):
users often had to wait hoursfor a single connection.
Imagine sitting in your pack,or dialing and waiting and waiting
and then waiting some more.
Internationally, the first carphone service in Europe was in the U.K.
in 1959.
This operated on a system called the PostOffice Radio Phone Service.

(04:58):
And then everythingstarted to change in 1973.
That's when Martin Cooper,an engineer at Motorola,
made the world's firstcellular phone call.
This wasn't technically a car phone,
but this moment markedthe beginning of a cellular revolution.
And you all would likelyrecognize the phone he used to.

(05:19):
The style and design of itbecame known as the brick.
And when I was a kid in the 1980s,that was the first quote unquote,
car phone I ever saw.
And by the1980s, car phones were in the spotlight.
This timeriding the wave of cellular technology.
the first true car phoneto use a cellular network, by the way,
was introduced in 1983 with the MotorolaDinah

(05:41):
Tech at $3,995.
It wasn't cheap.
In fact, that's over $12,000 today.
But it was lighter and more reliablethan its predecessors.
Car phones quickly becamea must have status symbol of the 1980s.
It was featured in movies like Wall Streetand TV shows like Miami Vice.

(06:02):
It was cool to have a car phone,and the market exploded.
By the end of the decade, there were over5 million mobile subscribers in the US,
many of whom used their phones primarily
in their cars and car design,specifically interior
design, was affectedby the popularity of car phones.

(06:23):
Obvious examples are limousinesin the 80s and 90s,
utilizing specific spaceto install a phone.
You'd also see, usuallyin higher end luxury sedans like Mercedes
and BMW was having space in the centerconsole for phones
to be put in or also built into the dash.
as the 90s came towards an end,

(06:45):
the car phone's glory dayswere also beginning to fade.
Phones had become smaller, cheaper,and most importantly, untethered.
They didn't have to stay in the car.
By the early 2000,s car phones were essentially gone.
though some of us speaking about myself,continued to use the term
car phonefor cell phones into the early 2000s.

(07:09):
But here's
where we can see clearlythe important legacy of car phones.
because a cell phonesmorphed into smartphones,
they were no longer a status symbol,but a tool we all use every day.
The idea of being connectedwhile on the move shaped
not only automotive design, butalso our broader culture of communication.
Today, our cars are equipped with handsfree systems, touch screens, apps,

(07:33):
all sorts of thingsthat turn a vehicle into a rolling office.
We can start our cars, lock the doorsand more from our cell phones.
So where do we go from here?
Experts predict that the next waveof automotive connectivity
will integrate even more seamlesslywith our digital lives.
Imagine autonomous cars equipped with 5Gnetworks, augmented reality windshields,

(07:58):
and AI driven voice assistantsthat make the car
feel honestlylike we're on an episode of Star Trek.
yet as we drive into the future,
it's worth rememberingthe quirky, trunk sized
beginnings of mobile communication.
The car phone will be rememberedas an important building block
of the modern age.

(08:23):
Thank you for listening to fuelfor the future,
presented by State Farm Insuranceand driven by America's Automotive Trust.
To learn more,visit America's Automotive trust.org.