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Ever wished your phone was a little more... intimate? Fabian Hemmert, a design researcher at the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany, certainly does. "Mobile phones use so little of our sensory abilities," he says. "They are great for information exchange - text, video, and speech - but they provide no feeling of nearness." That's why Hemmert has developed a series of phone prototypes that can transmit grasping, breathing or even kissing, which he presented last week at the Mobile HCI conference in Stockholm, Sweden. More »
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For all you whippersnappers out there who never had the experience, here's a primer on how to use a rotary dial telephone. Produced by Big Brother ... I mean, the telephone company ... in the 1930s, the film explained the dial tone and busy signal to consumers used to having the operator connect their calls. Fun fact: AT&T installed the first "automatic phones" in 1915 in Norfolk, Virginia, and removed the last manual phones from the system in 1978. More »
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Behold the "Telephone That Registers Calls in One's Absence." It sounds like something from the Onion, but it's an actual invention from the pages of Scientific American in 1919. The brainchild of a nameless "California inventor" (so much for his fifteen minutes of fame), the device was a recording telegraph made to be installed in "the base of the telephone instrument." It sounds ingenious, but there were two major drawbacks. More »
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Two peppy, Aryan teenagers learn how tomorrow's communication technology will help us live happily ever after in "Century 21 Calling," a Bell Telephone promo film shot at the Seattle World's Fair in 1964. After disembarking the monorail, the kids run through the fairgrounds, gawking at foreigners and passing up the peepshow (add Elvis and essentially this is the plot of his 1963 movie, "It Happened At The World's Fair"). More »
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