Mobile phone – in 1979!

The BBC’s flagship science programme in the 1970s was Tomorrow’s World – and in this programme from 1979, reporter Michael Rodd revealed a magic device we could scarcely have imagined would become part of our everyday lives: the mobile phone!

Anybody under the age of 40 has to realise that until as late as the 1990s, people used land lines – that is, telephones connected to the wall that weren’t going anywhere. We used a big rotating dial and fought with our siblings and parents to hog the family phone to chat to our mates. When it rang – we dashed to answer it in case it was a mate.  And in my teens, I remember using the payphone on the bar in the pub to find out why a friend or date was late.

So – here is when we first heard about the magic of cordless communication.