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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

Forget cartoons. Here's a video shot during the premiere of a Charlie Chaplin movie in the 1920's showing a woman walking along holding something to her ear and talking to herself. Looks an awful lot like a cell phone to me.

https://blog.myheritage.com/2010/10/a-mobile-phone-in-the-19...

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That's pretty cool. A number of comments on Youtube are saying "walkie-talkie", probably thinking of a 1960's/1970's form factor using transistors. Any voice transmitter in the 1920's would have used vacuum tubes.

But even then - the first "walkie-talkie" didn't exist for another 20 years, and was huge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-536

> The SCR-536 is often considered the first of modern hand-held, self-contained, "handie talkie" transceivers (two-way radios). It was developed in 1940 by a team

> The SCR-536 incorporated five vacuum tubes in a waterproof case.

Here's one of many debunkings: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/debun...

Even if you could somehow transport a cell phone back to 1920, it wouldn't work as there was no cell network back then. (Now, a walkie talkie on the other hand...)

Link wasn’t working for me, here’s the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6a4T2tJaSU

The original film likely had better resolution than the DVD, it would be nice to see a better scan.

Then hop in your Time Machine and go scan the 100 year old film strip.

The DVD is likely the best quality you’re going to get

DVDs are recent enough that the original material they are based on might likely still exist somewhere.

Perhaps it's just an ear horn?

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