In World War I, British biplanes had wireless phones in the cockpit
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
but, I was in no way the first, and it turns out there were over a million mobile phones in cars in the 1960's, with a little more pedigree to what we now have than the biplanes: https://weburbanist.com/2012/09/18/remember-millions-of-mobi...
Wireless telegraphy = Morse code used electromagnetic (radio / wireless) waves
Wireless telephony = voice sent over electromagnetic (radio / wireless) waves; sometimes referred to as radio telephony, although using radio was more common in US and Germany than UK until after the First World War.
And as a few other commentators pointed out, dialling is not an essential part of a telephone.
Is this for real? A 100 year old paper is subscription only?
It’s not a common use of the word phone today but it is a reasonable interpretation based on the technology of the time and how it was used.
That's not how words work. Dinosaur literally means terrible lizard, but they aren't lizards nor necessarily terrible.
> It’s not a common use of the word phone today
Lol so why use it in an article today?
Dinosaurs and lizards diverged at the lepidosaurs. A dinosaur is not a lizard. They share a common ancestor.
BUT telephones really are about voice communications at a distance and not about the particular mechanics that were popularized with the public telephone network. Telephone "numbers", dialling, all that stuff was added later and isn't part of the telephone concept. So although the Latin etymology isn't why these were telephones, they were anyway.
Em...no. it means "mighty" in the sense of "power beyond limits".
Em...yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur#Etymology
> The term is derived from Ancient Greek δεινός (deinos), meaning 'terrible, potent or fearfully great', and σαῦρος (sauros), meaning 'lizard or reptile'
> New Latin dīnosaurus, from Ancient Greek δεινός (deinós, “terrible, awesome, mighty, fearfully great”) + σαῦρος (saûros, “lizard, reptile”). Coined by paleontologist Richard Owen in 1842.
So dinosaur can be reasonably interpreted to mean "mighty reptile".
In fact the next sentence from the wikipedia page you linked suggests that was the intended meaning:
> Though the taxonomic name has often been interpreted as a reference to dinosaurs' teeth, claws, and other fearsome characteristics, Owen intended it merely to evoke their size and majesty.
This is consistent with the meaning of deinos: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B4%CE%B5%CE%B9%CE%BD%CF%8...
I don’t think you understand - they aren’t reptiles, mighty or otherwise. They’re lepidosaurs, but they aren’t reptiles.
"Dinosaurs are a diverse group of reptiles."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur
"The Lepidosauria (from Greek meaning scaled lizards) are reptiles with overlapping scales."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidosauria
In fact, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptile it doesn't look like dinosaurs are lepidosaurs at all.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dinosaur#Etymology
"Mighty reptiles"
But this article isn't about dinosaurs so it actually doesn't matter at all.
Describing the device in the article as a "wireless telephone" seems reasonable to me. It allowed voice communication at distance without wires.
Your question is answered by the rest of the sentence you didn't quote.
Describing the device as a "radio voice transceiver" might be more technically correct but I'm not sure how it makes the headline any better. Nobody uses that kind of language to describe a CB radio or cell phone, even though that's technically what they are.
The device fits within a reasonable interpretation of what we understand as a wireless telephone and how the device was used.
The headline could have been written "WWI pilots had CB radios" but then our pedantic argument here would be about what spectrum was used.
"the computer that the ancient greeks made"
"the ancient egyptian automobile"
"the subway of pipes underneath rome"
etc
"The first commercial installation of a telephone dial accompanied the first commercial installation of a 99-line automatic telephone exchange in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892"
Phone exchanges were you told an operator who you wanted to talk to are older. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange:
"The first experimental telephone exchange was based on the ideas of Puskás, and it was built by the Bell Telephone Company in Boston in 1877. The world's first state-administered telephone exchange opened on November 12, 1877"
Phone lines that were 1:1 were even older, but not by much (Bell's patent is from 1876)
Example:
http://www.arrl.org/files/file/Regulatory/Band%20Chart/Band%...
Early military radios had a switch labeled "CW" and "Phone".
In radio parlance, "CW" was Telegraphy and "Phone" was Telephony, so in this context the term "Phone" derived from the term "Radio Telephony".
"Phoning" is used for a lot of conceptually similar or analogous actions without implying the use of an actual phone. Like when a device or software "phones home" without being a phone. The device and the concept of the action are independent. We've called devices "telephones" for more than 200 years now and the earliest ones were just megaphones. Very loose decades or centuries old references to a "phone" aren't relevant for an article written today.
My point is according to any reasonably modern definition of the words, what's presented in the article is a radio and not a phone, and the usage of "wireless phone" in the title is just an attention grab. Perhaps "biplanes had those days' equivalent of wireless phones in the cockpit" would have been more appropriate... and less clicky.
Then why didn't you (or the FAA for example) just call them "phones" but "2-way radios"? That undermines the rest of your point.
The concept of a modern phone* implies simultaneous 2 way voice and also dialing functionality. A "phone mode of operation" just mimics some of that functionality. Otherwise every 2-way voice radio ever used would be called "phone". But they're not because they aren't.
Defending such a clickbaity definition of "a phone" is surprising especially in a community like HN where I expect people to be more precise with terminology.
*and that's the concept that matters. Today using a 100 year old definition of a phone is just as inappropriate as a 20 year old definition of broadband.
Radios don't have a "phone" mode of operation because they mimic telephones. "Phone" does, and always has meant "audio". We don't call radios "phones" for the same reason we don't call them "audio". Likewise, phonographs aren't named after telephones, either.
Now the article is written in 2020, when "wireless phone" means only "wireless telephone", something different from the radio presented in the article. And clickbaity titles are all the rage. Which was my point.
These only transmitted CW which was used to send Morse code.