Weekend Assignment "Cell Phone"- Anjali Patel

After searching ProQuest for the earliest use of the words “Cell Phone” in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, I was surprised how cell phones were described. The earliest articles were published around 1985 and explained how these devices called cell phones worked. The articles explained the variety of companies that offer these devices and the coverage for these providers. At this point, the coverage was very limited because there was no real “network” for cell phones. The most shocking account of cell phones was an article that explained the portable nature of cell phones and how they weigh four pounds or less. This sounds absolutely ridiculous to us. After searching for “cell phone” in various scholarly article databases, similar results to the newspaper articles were found. The earliest mention of cell phones occurred in the early 1980s in these articles. These articles explained the technology behind these devices and explained that they would remain fairly expensive due to low demand. Cell phone means something completely different to us today. It is something that works almost everywhere unlike in its earlier days, it isn’t something we have to lug around because cell phones definitely do not weigh four pounds anymore, they are demanded by everyone because one basically cannot function without a cell phone, and the most drastic change is that cell phones do so much more than just make calls nowadays. All these advances in cell phone technology were unthinkable when they first emerged as a portable calling device.