🇬🇧 The Origins of Mobile Telephony

There was a brief, almost anecdotal moment when telephony from the car was already possible: it happened in 1949, in post-war Italy and, although it did not prosper, it marked a curious milestone in the history of connectivity on wheels. It was in Naples where the first Public Auto Telephone was installed, invented by researchers Mario Iovine and Angelo Maiello.

That innovation, which seemed almost science fiction for its time, consisted of a system of telephone stations on the sidewalk that allowed motorists to make calls without getting out of the vehicle (depending on the car model, that is).

In full effervescence for the modernization of the country, Italy implemented at the end of the 40s a telephone system intended for drivers.

It was 1949 and this curious car phone was neither wireless nor universal. In fact, it needed a specific facility and was restricted to certain urban areas. However, it represented one of the first public attempts to facilitate communication on the move, anticipating, decades in advance, the first hands-free connectivity solutions such as Bluetooth kits or voice assistants.

But the idea of communicating from the car was not born in Italy. Back in 1920, a visionary named W.W. Macfarlane in Pennsylvania (USA), made a wireless call from his car to his wife. To do this, he used a rudimentary radio system that some media of the time qualified as a “cordless phone”.

In 1921, in Detroit, the first radiotelephone was installed in a vehicle, and in 1946 AT&T launched the first official telephone service for cars in the USA, with a high cost and saturated lines. In Italy, the car phone would officially arrive in 1973 from the hand of SIP, although with much more advanced technology.

@TARTARIA HISPANICA

@TARTARIA in my CITY 🏰

The copyright of the music belongs to Renato Carosone.

🇬🇧 "Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later reject the illusory worldview grafted on from birth through social conditioning. They begin to feel that something is wrong and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous external experiences show them a side of reality that others ignore, and thus the journey of awakening begins. Every step of the journey is made by following the heart rather than the crowd, and choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance."

Henri Bergson

Join us
@Picos Pardos

@TARTARIA HISPANICA

@TARTARIA in my CITY 🏰