Can you hear me now?
It may be hard to remember, but before everyone and their dog owned a mobile (the PetsCell hit shelves late last year), phones had to be transported in cars, bags and bricks. Here's a look back
BY Sarah Ferguson
1940s In 1842, Samuel Morse sent the first electrical message unconnected by wires, but it wasn’t until 1946 that the technology went mobile. The first car phones—small in neither size nor price—offered regular disconnections, static and worked with the car’s engine running to not drain the battery.
1970s
Martin Cooper led
Motorola’s cellular research, beginning
in 1954, and it was Cooper who placed
the first-ever mobile phone call—to his
rival at AT&T — while walking the streets
of New York in 1973. The phone weighed
almost a kilogram.
1980s 
Ten years later,
the first commercially
available version of
Cooper’s brick phone
is no sexier than the
prototype. Michael
Douglas’s villainous
Gordon Gekko from
1987’s Wall Street looks
slightly less ruthless
than he should, yakking
on the DynaTAC, in its
full jumbo plainness.
The on-person bag phone
is a descendent of the original
car phone. Powered through a
vehicle’s lighter, the bag phone’s
greater coverage zone made it
stiff competition for the brick, as
demonstrated by Danny Glover
in the original Lethal Weapon
(1987).
The 1990s 
saw the mass proliferation of the cell
phone—shrunken to a
manageable size. And while
it meant Hollywood stars got
to look more stylish, studies
started revealing the health
risks associated with the
electromagnetic frequencies
used by cell phones—linking
them to memory loss,
brain cancer and erectile
dysfunction.
21st century
The recent evolution of the cell phone
has centred on function over form. Features such as
cameras in mobiles have had real-world implications.
Some companies have banned camera phones from
offices for fear of spies. And cameras have been
used as media devices, as in the 2005 bomb blasts
in London, where all early images came from cell
phones.
