Can you guess what the world's first text message said?

Four out of 10 people admit to sleeping with their phones near their side in case they miss a text

It is 30 years since Britain’s first mobile telephone call, made using a cumbersome hand set and a battery the size of a house brick. Since then the phones have altered out of all recognition and changed our lives.

•The UK’s first commercial call took place on New Year’s Day 1985 between Sir Ernest Harrison, chairman of Racal Vodafone, and his son Michael. The 24-year-old left a family party in Surrey and drove to London with the Transportable VT1 device. Speaking from Parliament Square, he told his dad: “Hi, it’s Mike. Happy New Year. This is the first ever call on a UK mobile network.” Later the same day comedian Ernie Wise became the first celebrity to make a mobile telephone call.

•The first mobile telephone call in the world was made on April 3, 1973 by Martin Cooper, a former Motorola inventor, who is known as ‘the father of the cellphone’. From Sixth Avenue in New York, he rang the boss of a rival manufacturer who was less than thrilled to discover he’d lost the race to develop a portable, hand-held device. Cooper later recalled: “There was silence at the other end of the line. I suspect he was grinding his teeth.” Mobile phones were on sale commercially in the US two years before they were launched on the UK market.

•Mungo Park, a City stockbroker descendant of the Scottish explorer of the same name, was the first person to buy a mobile phone in the UK. The model, a VM1 Panasonic in-car device, cost £1,200.He recalls: “The impact of the phone was fantastic, adding an extra 90 minutes to my day and it quickly paid for itself. I could use the call to say goodnight to my children if I was heading home from work or running late, as well as calling businesses in different time zones day or night.”

•Despite having huge batteries, the first mobile phones had a talk time of just 30 minutes and took about 10 hours to charge. They weighed about 12lbs (the same as six bags of sugar), compared with latest models which weigh less than 3oz.

Comedian Ernie Wise and friends launching the Racal-Vodafone computer controlled cellular

Vodafone’s 1985 monopoly of the UK mobile market lasted just nine days before Cellnet (now O2) launched its rival service

•Vodafone’s 1985 monopoly of the UK mobile market lasted just nine days before Cellnet (now O2) launched its rival service.

•Mobile phone salesman Steve Phillips was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet members of the Royal Family in 1985. But Palace security staff weren’t up to speed with the technology and mistook Steve’s cumbersome telephone, which he’d brought to show a fascinated Duke of Edinburgh, for a bomb.

•The first smartphone was IBM’s Simon model, which was unveiled at the Wireless World Conference in 1993. It had an LCD touchscreen and also functioned as an email device, electronic pager, calendar, address book and calculator;

•Mobile phone texting was first introduced 21 years ago. Neil apworth, a 22-year-old software programmer from Reading, sent the very first message when he wished his friend Richard Jarvis of Vodafone: “Merry Christmas”. At the time mobile phones didn’t have keyboards so it was sent via personal computer.

•The original 160-character size limit for text messages is credited to German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand. He arrived at the number by typing a series of random questions and thoughts into his typewriter and counting the characters. He found 160 to be “perfectly sufficient” to express almost any thought or question.

Michael Douglas in Wall Street in 1987

•Four out of 10 people admit sleeping with their mobile phone near their side so they don’t miss a call or text message.

•The average person unlocks his or her smartphone 110 times a day and sends 170 text messages per month. One survey shows that 63 per cent of women and 73 per cent of men don’t go more than an hour without checking their phone.

• When the first phones were sold in the UK 30 years ago there were just five masts, all in London. There are now more than 40,000, providing signals for the nation’s 70 million mobile telephones. Britons now make more than 132 million mobile calls every day;

•The first photo to be shared using a mobile phone was taken in 1997 by Philippe Kahn. He sent snaps from the maternity ward where his daughter Sophie was born. Kahn, an inventor from France, is credited with developing the world’s first camera phonehe Apple iPhone 5 Black Diamond carries a cool £10million price tag. The device is made from solid gold, encrusted with 600 diamonds, and comes in a platinum box. It was commissioned by a wealthy Chinese businessman in 2013. Earlier this year a version costing £34million was announced.

•The first call from the top of Mount Everest was made by British explorer Daniel Hughes on 19 May 2013.

•Launched in 1998, the Nokia 8810 was the first commercial mobile phone to feature an internal antenna. This small change made a huge difference, making phones more practical to carry around. Nokia’s 1100 remains the best-selling single model. More than 250 million devices were snapped up, also making the phone the best-selling electrical gadget in history ahead of the PlayStation 2.

•Celina Aarons, from Florida, is thought to hold the dubious honour of having racked up the highest ever mobile phone bill. She neglected to change her calling plan to an international one when the phone was used for two weeks in Canada. The result was a £142,000 bill, which was later reduced to £1,800 by the phone company.

•Of the world’s seven billion population, six billion now own a mobile phone but only 4.5 billion have a toilet. It’s predicted that ownership of mobile phones will outstrip the population of the planet sometime during 2015. There are already more than

100 countries throughout the world where the number of cell phones exceeds the national population.

•In the UK more than 92 per cent of people now own a mobile phone. They are most commonly used not for making calls but for checking the time. In the UK, the volume of calls from mobile phones first exceeded the volume of calls from fixed phones in 2011;

•About two per cent of mobile owners have their phones stolen each year – a theft every three minutes. The Metropolitan Police say that mobile thefts account for one third of all street robberies in London;

•The average age for owning your first cell phone is 13 years old.

•At any given second, 4.3 million people in the world are having a conversation on their mobile phone. In the US, 15 per cent of people admit to interrupting sex to answer a call.

• In an essay in 1958, the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke envisioned in a future world: “a personal transceiver, so small and compact that every man carries one.” He also wrote:

“The time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth merely by dialling a number.” Such a device would also, in Clarke’s vision, include a method for global positioning so that “no one need ever again be lost.”


express.co.uk