How can anyone forget Cannons "cell phone"?
At the time, ot was a mobile car phone, and you had to call the "mobile operator" to make a call.
From what I have heard, they did really have these car phones back in the day, but there was a huge box in the trunk with the equipmewnt for it.
Cannon seemed to have a regular Phone receiver with a dangling cord in the car to use as his "car phone".
213 191 9221 is the number he states is his to the the operator in A Flight of Hawks.
You can add David Janssen in the series "Richard Diamond, Private Detective", from the 50's. From his car he would call an operator named Sam, and only her legs and chest and shadowed face could be seen on screen, as she called him Mr. D in a sultry voice. It was revealed that the actress who played Sam was none other than Mary Tyler Moore.
shareI think Honey West had one in her Cobra (from the mid-60's).
I watch alotta TV...but that doesn't mean I don't have a job.
Has every one forgot that you used to use a CB radio to make phone calls from cars. By the way the mobile dispatcher was just a person at a receiver transferring your "call" to a land line. We use the same process today only it works automatically at any cell tower.
shareCannon did not use a CB radio. The first TV detective I remember having a CB in their car was Dan Tana on VEGA$. He also had a scanner and a mobile phone. I'm not sure if his was a cell phone. The show debuted in 1978 and the first consumer cellular phones started in some markets in 1977. Tana's car phone looked more like the modern ones, a one piece handset with the keypad on the top back, it had a red led display like old calculators.
Someone with the right equipment at the base end of a CB could link a call to a phone but the limited range of CB radios didn't make this practical.
On the original Hawaii Five-O they would use their police radios, different frequencies from CB's and more powerful, to contact 'Central' and patch through calls. This was in lieu of a mobile phone in the police car. It required someone at Central to dial the number and connect to the party then 'patch' the phone and radio together. It was not duplex so you couldn't speak and listen at the same time like on an actual mobile telephone.
In the mid eighties I had a friend with a business radio (closer to police radios than CB's) set up to connect to a phone line. His handheld radio (walkie talkie) had a numeric keypad on it. If you held down the talk button and dialed the right sequence of number you could place a call. He had a standard home phone rigged up in his truck to work with the radio in there the same way. It was pretty cool but once again it didn't offer duplex send/receive.
The thing I remember is that there was always much more demand than supply. The analog phones of the day took up much more "bandwidth" than the digital phones of today, so given a limited supply of frequency spectrum, only a relatively few phones could be allocated in any particular area.
The result was that there were very long waiting lists to get one of these mobile phones. Especially in places like Southern California, it could take years of waiting on a list before you finally got your phone.
"He was running around like a rooster in a barnyard full of ducks."--Pat Novak
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A later show, but Charlie's Angels had them, too.
shareCellular phones weren't commercially available until 1983, even though the technology was invented about 10 years earlier. The "phones" in movies and TV shows (Perry White (Neil Hamilton) had a phone in his car on Superman), were essentially just radios, with the transmission equipment in the trunk. A mobile operator handled the switching, which is why the always asked for the mobile operator. Stuart McMillan had a car phone, as did others. They weren't unheard of, but only the well to do, government, and corporate types could afford them.
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