MovieChat Forums > The Love Bug (1969) Discussion > What type of call phone used by Thorndyk...

What type of call phone used by Thorndyke?

posted 16 years ago by IDBmmcjwo
5 replies | jump to latest

During the movie, Thorndyke made calls from his car phone. Cell phones are so commonplace today that this didn't seem so unusual...until one realizes the film was made in 1968. Can anyone describe what kind of phone this was?

I'm aware that telephones in cars had been in use for decades before 1960s, but can't find anything that explains how they worked--especially, how did the radio car phone make a connection to the land-line telephone system? Did a caller always have to go through a radio operator to make a call?

[–] dave_08057 16 years ago

He was probably using the the "Mobile Telephone Service"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Telephone_Service

[–] cmjohnson87 15 years ago

He was in can't remember a Rolls Royce or a Bentley and upper scale cars such as those even in the 60s, generally had Mobile Telephone Service as an option.

[–] herbertanchovy 14 years ago

These were about in the '60s, just ludicrously expensive- to purchase and use. and the boot of the car would have an enormous control box to run it.

[–] 14 years ago

[deleted]

[–] thomas196x2000 8 years ago

You want to be shocked, Humphrey Bogart used one in "Sabrina"!.

Back then, service was typically only in large cities, and it was similar to "marine" communication service. It was not "cell" technology.

My dad ran Denver's NCR accounting services in the 1960s, and one of his sales managers had a Buick Riviera with a red phone in it. The handpiece was similar to a home phone and it mounted under the dash. The other poster is correct, your "transceiver" back then took up a good portion of the trunk. But for people who did not mind paying and didn't stray far from a major city that provided the service, they were pretty neat.'

Remember, the only other forms of remote communication was two way radios, and a beeper--not a pager--a beeper.