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Good reception
(Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier (IA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Oct. 13--WATERLOO -- On this day in 1983 -- long before the word "text" became a verb -- Bob Barnett placed the first commercial wireless telephone call.
On Oct. 13, 1983, Barnett, former president of Ameritech Mobile Communications, made the call from Soldier Field in Chicago to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell who was in Germany at the time.
He made the call on the a Motorola DynaTAC, a 2-pound, 13-inch $4,000 phone. The phone was good for an hour of use and then needed to be charged for eight hours.
As phones got smaller in size and price, wireless communication became a $143 billion industry with more than 262 million subscribers. Ameritech Mobile would eventually become a part of companies that later evolved into Verizon Wireless.
Phones now weigh a few ounces, and can transmit text, pictures and data, and can log onto the Internet.
"I am just in awe of all the things we can do with phones," said Bill Bradford, CEO of Next Generation Wireless.
Bradford began selling cellular phones in 1995.
"It was a want item for the first three or four years," he said. "After that it became a need item."
Kendra Thibadeau described cell phones as "not my favorite item."
Nonetheless, she was shopping for a new one Friday afternoon at the Crossroads Center U.S. Cellular store.
"The text keypad would be nice," she said. "I live by texting."
Her three children also have cell phones. They keep track of each other via text messages, she said.
"It's almost a necessity anymore," she said. "My mother even has one and she said she would never, ever get one."
As the size and price of phones shrank, more people bought them. Today, some people can't imagine being without theirs.
"There's never a day I don't use it," said Jo Johnson.
She remembers her family's first phone, a suitcase phone that was kept in the car.
Bradford remembers selling those models at $2,500 each with 30-minutes-per-month plans.
Bradford is glad he moved into the wireless business. He now oversees stores in Iowa, Missouri and Illinois, and company revenue reached $14.1 million in 2007.
"I knew it would be successful," he said. "But I had no idea it would be this successful."
After 25 years of changes, Bradford said he is reluctant to guess what the next decades will bring.
"If you would have told me (in 1995) that in 10 years we could send e-mail, photos and hook onto the Internet, I would have laughed," he said.
Contact John Molseed at (319) 291-1418 or john.molseed@wcfcourier.com
To see more of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.wcfcourier.com/.
Copyright (c) 2008, Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, Iowa
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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