DESIGN & TECH/ CELL PHONES IN 1919 WHO KNEW?

THE POCKET TELEPHONE—PREDICTED IN 1919 

 By Thomas Shess 

 A century before we began silencing cellphones at concerts, weddings and other inconvenient moments, British cartoonist William Kerridge Haselden saw the nuisance coming. 

 His six-panel cartoon, reproduced here, imagines a future “when we all have pocket telephones.” The devices ring while their owners are running for a train, carrying packages, standing in the rain, holding a baby, attending a concert and—perhaps worst of all—getting married. 

 “We shall certainly be ‘rung up’ at the most awkward moments in our daily lives!” Haselden concluded. 

 Bull’s-eye. 

The cartoon first appeared in London’s Daily Mirror on March 5, 1919, under the title “The Pocket Telephone: When Will It Ring?” It was republished on January 23, 1923, with the headline “When We All Have Pocket Telephones.” 

 

Haselden (left) was not drawing technological fantasy from thin air. Only days before the cartoon appeared, newspapers were reporting a prediction by Godfrey Isaacs, managing director of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. Isaacs foresaw a time when wireless telephones would be small enough to fit inside a coat pocket and nearly everyone would carry one. 

 Haselden immediately recognized the comic possibilities. The artist was less interested in how the proposed telephone would work than in what it would do to everyday life. 

His imaginary pocket phone was always ringing at the wrong time. It demands attention, interrupts public performances and intrudes upon private occasions. In other words, Haselden predicted the social problem as accurately as he predicted the machine. 

 Born in Seville, Spain, in 1872 to English parents, Haselden was largely self-taught as an artist. He became a longtime contributor to the Daily Mirror and Punch, specializing in cartoons about changing manners, fashions and technology. 

His trademark was a large drawing divided into several related panels—a format that helped earn him recognition as a father of the British newspaper comic strip. 

 He died in 1953, two decades before Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first widely recognized handheld cellular telephone call in 1973. The commercial cellphone still lay farther in the future. 

 What Haselden could not foresee was that his annoying telephone would eventually become a camera, newspaper, road map, typewriter, television, library, alarm clock, record collection and portable office. Nor could he have guessed that millions of people would willingly stare at one throughout dinner. But he understood human nature. 

 More than 100 years later, phones still ring at concerts. They still interrupt weddings. People still answer them while juggling packages, boarding trains and holding babies. 

The technology changed beyond anything Haselden drew, but the awkward moments remained remarkably familiar. 

 Who knew? 

 William Kerridge Haselden did.