raffertyesque

In the great pantheon of technological rivalries… Edison versus Tesla, Gates versus Jobs, that caveman who made fire by banging two rocks together versus that other caveman who made fire by rubbing two sticks together, one rivalry stands above all the rest: Cooper versus Engel.

Who versus who? Martin Cooper and Joel Engel. Of Motorola and Bell Laboratories, respectively. In the early 1970s they were each in a race to create the first cell phone. And in 1973, Cooper won by calling Engel on what is now considered the first modern cell phone. Zack Morris style, of course.

I remember the first time I encountered a cell phone. It was in high school, and one of my friends had just bought himself a shitty used car, as high schoolers frequently do to this day. This car was a slightly less shitty than average, however, because it came with a car phone! A car phone! It’s a car with a phone soldered to it! Or a phone with a car soldered to it! Depending on your perspective!

The thing was a beast, it sat between the driver seat and the passenger seat and had a wire running up to the roof and back to the rear window where there was a big honking antenna attached. The keypad was on the back of the handset and had these awesome rubber keys with an amber backlight, as many products from the 1980s did. (We were firmly in the 1990s, mind you, closer to the 2000s, really, but the phone was definitely from the 1980s.)

Obviously I knew about the existence of cell phones prior to encountering one, but I didn’t know the fine details. For example, the thing that boggled my mind the most was that you dialed the number and then pressed the “send” button to place a call. Forget the whole phone in a car that has no physical connection to the phone network… there was no dial tone! Madness.

I have no idea what the bill must have been per month on that thing (the phone, not the car) (the phone no doubt cost more, though). It was probably like $100 for 60 minutes or something. And those minutes were getting used goddammit, because they sure as hell weren’t rolling over. He’d call me on it once in a while, just to get his money’s worth, and I’d never be able to understand him, and half the time the call would get dropped.

Which brings me to my main point: cell phones are sort of a step backwards.

In the years between that car phone and today, the phone part of cell phones haven’t really improved. They’ve gotten smaller, yes, and they’ve gained features, but this is just to distract us from the fact that the phone part of the phone sucks, when it works at all.

How did we go from a reliable and robust communications network (remember when your electricity would go out but your home phone would still work?) to one that fluctuates between shitty and inoperable? When it works, call quality sucks, and when it doesn’t work you just send an email. Or a smoke signal with your smoke signal app.

I blame myself. I spent a semester in Berlin in college and everyone in Berlin had a cell phone. (Oder ein “Handy” wie die Deutscher sagt.) (Presumably because they fit in your hand, maybe? Still not sure on that one.) When I came back everyone in the United States had cellphoned up. Clearly I brought the cell phone virus back with me. I’m patient zero. I am the Typhoid Mary of cell phones.

Even television characters had started carrying cell phones. Sure, more often than not the plots revolved around the phones not working as screenwriters hadn’t adapted to this brave new cellphone-equipped world, but the point stands. (Someone should write a paper about that, the effect of cell phones on screenwriting. It could be called “Can You Hear Me Writing A Non-Contrived Scenario Involving Cell Phones Now?” or “The Call Is Coming From Inside Your Pants!” or something like that.)

Point is, cell phone adoption was just another instance of convenience over quality. Just like MP3s replaced CDs because they were far more convenient despite being of inferior quality, cell phones replaced landlines. Sure, cell phones weren’t nearly as reliable, and the fidelity sucked, but you could make a phone call wherever you were in the world. Or, you know, mostly wherever. Unless you happened to be on AT&T and lived in New York City. Or San Francisco. Or Alaska. Or upstate New York. Montana. Some parts of Los Angelos. You get the idea. Asterisks.

So why haven’t cell phones stepped up their game like MP3s? MP3s sound way better now than they did 10 years ago and, if anything, cell phone call quality has gotten worse in that timeframe.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that you can’t market call fidelity. People don’t care about hearing pins drop anymore. The era of the phone call is over. Phones as phones are dead. And, oddly enough, phones killed phones. People don’t care about phones, people care about internet speeds and video calls and and text messaging plans and cat videos on YouTube. Plenty of people would be fine with that 60 minute a month phone plan from 1982 at this point. We’ve moved on.

Indeed, we are living through the end of an era right now. That era began in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell made his first historic phone call to his assistant Thomas A. Watson. Bell’s first words were: “Mr. Watson— come here— I want to see you.”

Little did Martin Cooper know, but in 1973, when he made the first cell phone call to Joel Engel, that was the beginning of the end of the phone. Cooper’s first words were: “Mr. Engel— Mr. Engel, Mr. Engel are you there? Is this thing on? Wait, AT&T coverage is kind of spotty here.”