Tomorrow's World | Mobile Phone

It's 1979 and time for the telephone to go mobile. In this report from a longer programme, Michael Rodd (pictured above) examines a British prototype for a cordless telephone that allows the user to make calls from anywhere. Also included at the end of this item is a rather nice out-take as Rodd also experiences the first mobile wrong number.

The same year that this programme aired, NTT launched the earliest commercial mobile phone network in Japan, with northern Europe getting its first network by 1981. In the United States, mobile phones tend to be known as 'cellphones' due to the way that early networks relied upon groups of small areas of connectivity, or cells, which overlapped to create wider coverage.