Not Your Ma's Bell Telephone

 

The telephone above was made out of bakelite which was invented in 1907. It always came in black. It had a rotary dial. Did you see the movie, Dial M For Murder? I never had a phone like this. It was from the 40s and 50s. My first family's phone was a wall unit in the 60s. It was beige plastic. Later they came out with push button phones. My family didn't get a telephone until I was in high school. All it could do was make telephone calls. At first they had party lines and switchboards. I missed all that. We had no idea what was coming thanks to science, the space program, and great American innovation. I never had a princess phone either.

In the movie Scream they had portable phones with a large antenna. 

I never talked to my dad on the phone.

Then came the cell phone, flip phone, and Obama Phone. The British call them mobiles.

Now the SMART PHONE.

• It can get the internet
• you can make calls, get email and text and receive all three
• it has unlimited minutes
• you can use ear buds
• it has caller ID
• it has voice mail
• it can identify spam
• you can do your banking on it
• it has the time and date
• you can check the news
• it has Apps to load music and radio stations and schedule Uber and Lyft car pickups or activate your ADT security system
• it has replaced the encyclopedia and operates like a computer
• it has replaced the dictionary
• it has contacts
• it has GPS
• you can use Find Friends and see the geographic location of your friend's and your family's phones
• you can order and track packages
• it has blue tooth to talk over your car speaker
• you can use it as a boarding pass
• you can use it to look up Youtube and how to fix things
• it has a camera
• you can store photos
• you can take a screen shot
• you can do Face Time
• you can Zoom
• you can follow real estate
• get digital coupons
• it has put the adult bookstore almost out of business
• it has a flashlight
• the screen lights up
• it has fingerprint ID to log in that works some of the time
• it has a numeric log in that forces you to remember "one" more password