Cellular phone calls began 35 years ago today

You can tell how old a movie is by the telephones, and the movie doesn't have to be that old to tell a difference.

A few years old, and someone may use a cellular telephone to make a call, but it's considerably larger than the one carried by a typical teenager today.

A few years older than that, and the movie characters are looking for a pay phone.

You remember those? You put in some money -- years back, it was a nickel, today, 50 cents or more? -- and you call someone else with a hard-wired telephone.

We remember actually doing a news story and photograph about one of the first mobile telephones in town -- one of those 10-pound bag phones that rested between the bucket seats.

Now that cellular telephones are taken for granted, it's hard to believe that today marks the 35th anniversary of the first cellular telephone call, on April 3, 1973.

Martin Cooper, known as the father of the cell phone, made the first call using a "brick" phone in New York City.

Ten years later, the DynaTAC phone, weighing in at 11⁄2 pounds, sold for $3,500 with one hour of talk time, eight hours of standby, and could store 20 numbers.

With cellular telephone towers going up all over Southwest Nebraska, cell phones are far from a novelty. In fact, more and more customers are cutting the wire altogether, meaning about 12 percent of U.S. households use cell phones as their only means of voice communications, up from 7.7 percent in 2005.

Not only that, their wireless phone provides a broad range of services from GPS locations, e-mails, personalized ring tones and MP3 tunes, Internet, photos, scheduling and entertainment.

Cellular phones became so much more affordable and popular that by 1992, 7.5 million of us had them. Unbelievably, there were more than 243.3 subscribers in the United States in 2007, according to information from the wireless industry group CTIA, as provided by U.S. Cellular.

Other facts:

* During the first six months of 2007, customers logged 1.95 trillion minutes of usage -- the equivalent of 1.6 million years spent on the cell phone.

* More than 28.8 billion text messages were sent the first six months of 2007, up from 12.2 million in June 2000.

* The Nebraska Public Service Commission said the number of Nebraska landlines has dropped more than 200,000 in the apst six years, but there are half a million more cell phones in Nebraska since 1999. At the end of July 2007, Nebraskans were carrying 1,119,806 cell phones, and there were 936,745 landlines in Nebraska at the end of 2006.

The shift makes it all the more important that effective Enhanced 911 service, with GPS location of the caller, be up and running so that timely emergency response is available in all parts of Nebraska.

It's hard for today's teen to realize there was a time when not everyone was able to communicate instantly with their friends, when personal communicators were a thing of science fiction.

But that was 35 years ago. Who can imagine what the next 35 years will bring?