Executive’s 1953 prediction for the future goes viral for haunting accuracy

At a time when the rotary phone was still something of a luxury, one man was able to see the true potential of that device in the years and decades to come

Archive material has been unearthed that shows a telecommunications company predicting the rise and ubiquitous nature of smartphones from as far back as the early 1950s.

While cultural lag meant that much of the world didn't see the utility in mobile phones until the late 1990s, one pioneer in 1953 managed to predict a world not too dissimilar from the one we inhabitant today. He, along with several other telecommunication insiders, had a sense of how the relatively primitive telephone would morph and evolve over the coming decades.

“Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today,” said Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company director Mark R. Sullivan in 1953, Openculture reports.

“It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actually translate from one language to another?”

Just three years earlier, writes KQED’s Rae Alexandra, Sullivan “appeared in the San Francisco Examiner talking about the latest innovations in telephone technology. The advancement he was most proud of was a new device about the size of a small typewriter that automatically calculated how long people’s phone calls were.”

And yet, no matter how logical pocket-sized telephones appear to us today, such an invention would have been regarded as the stuff of science fiction back in the 1950s.

Curiously enough, however, Mr Sullivan’s predictions, when printed in the Tacoma News Tribune, were given a more chilling and insidious slant. “They’ll be no escape in future from telephones”, their headline reads.

While some might argue that this line was especially prophetic, the modern landscape is surely beyond the wildest imaginations of Mr Sullivan, who couldn't have foreseen the full integration of the phone and the internet.

Before passing away, he did get to see the first commercial cellphone go onto the market in 1983. The revolutionary Motorola DynaTAC 8000X cost a whopping $3,995 at the time, which would be over $11,000 today.

While it wasn't quite the phone that Mr Sullivan had predicted all those years ago, he “might have seen this development as a step towards his long-ago vision — a sign that every one of his 1953 predictions would eventually come to fruition,” Ms Alexandra added.