The cell phone: Celebrating an icon at fifty

Even as the country is contending with the aftermath of the recent general polls, such should not deny Nigerians the opportunity of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of a most deserving icon—the ubiquitous cell phone. Easily one of the most sought after and highly prized personal effects today by any person around the globe, the cell […]

Even as the country is contending with the aftermath of the recent general polls, such should not deny Nigerians the opportunity of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of a most deserving icon—the ubiquitous cell phone. Easily one of the most sought after and highly prized personal effects today by any person around the globe, the cell phone clocks fifty years this month, having been first used on April 3, 1973.

It was on that day that a certain pair of Martins Cooper and John Mitchel—both of whom were staff of Motorola Company in the US created history of the launch of the cellphone. Martins had successfully made the first ever call from a New York street corner through his invention—a wireless telephone to Mitchel who was in their Motorola office, and launched the world into a new era of communicating from any point of the earth to another with pinpoint accuracy and exclusiveness. From then his invention laid the path for cell phone services to be available to the general public. And as they say it, the rest is history.

Although before then, wireless communication had been in vogue, with Italy’s Gugleimo Marconi having pioneered in 1895 wireless technology. This in turn launched radio communication and a regime of uses including communication to distant locations in space and the resultant advances in broadcast industry, which with the television and internet revolutions had changed the story of the world. From then the world became one single entity with interpersonal interactions on real time basis, flowing across great distances. This was just as the context of person to person communication changed permanently and gave root to what the cell phone remains the symbol today.

For most users of the cell phone – especially the younger generation (not only in Nigeria but the world over),  it is not out of place that they may take it for granted, with scant regard for its long and chequered history.  Yet the cell phone at their disposal is a product of the best and most adventurous efforts in engineering enterprise to solve man’s most pronounced challenge which is to communicate with each other across long distances without let or hindrance. Man is a social animal with life outside society being solitary and brutish. This is just as effective communication remains the life blood of that society. This consideration alone accentuates the critical importance of the telephone and now the cell phone to man and society.

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Without prejudice to its innumerable uses today, the history of the cell phone parades a most impressive timeline, both in the global context and Nigeria’s dalliance with it. For starters, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a US patent in 1876 for inventing the telephone which had earlier changed the world dramatically. However, its advantages and benefits notwithstanding, the traditional telephone – in its different forms in which it appeared to the world,  had a major drawback as it operated through a cable which confined it to specific locations. Meanwhile wireless communication offered the advantage of  use without the restrictions of confinement, even as it was available to a select few who could operate it with its specialized languages, codes and related procedures.  The breakthrough for the world was the convergence of the various respective technologies into the cell phone wonder. And that came to be in 1973.

For Nigeria, the cell phone arrived its shores in 1996 which was 23 years after the world, when the government’s telephone monopoly – Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL), launched it as an expansion of its vastly restrictive teledensity, with the total number of telephone lines in the country then numbering just less than 350,000 for a population of 119 million at that time. This translated to a telephone distribution of one line to 340 Nigerians!   Older Nigerians may remember the now rested ubiquitous ‘nought-nine-nought’   hand held phone that was a status symbol, even as it was nothing more than than mere mobile extension of the existing lines.

Needless to state here that the available lines were exclusively for the well-heeled and affluent in the society. Many Nigerian may still remember the graphic rendering of the pallid situation by a former Minister of Communications who once stated rather glibly that telephones were not “meant for the poor in Nigeria”. The sheer insensitivity and indifference to the plight of the country’s poor masses in that statement, did not rub off the collective conscience of the nation for a long time.

The picture was however to change around 1996 when the late Nigerian leader General Sani Abacha brought the new generation GSM cell phone technology to  Nigeria and confined its deployment to just one company —Motophone Nigeria Limited in which he had personal interest. His death in 1998, crashed the prospects of his exclusive deployment of the Motophone dispensation. It eventually took the enterprise of the newly elected administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo to launch a new National Telecomunications Policy in 1999, with late Mohamed Arzika as Minister of Communications. It was this policy that created the template for the formal deployment of the GSM cell phone service across to general use by Nigerians, and formally connected the country to the rest of the world on terms of parity in telephony. Nigeria is today part of the global network of over 180 countries over 437 networks using the GSM and the cell phone.

Nigeria’s advance in modern telephony with respect to the cell phone technology since then has been in leaps and bounds. In 2021 the total number of telephone connections or lines was put at 189.7 million for a population of 210 million. This gives a distribution of about one telephone line for every Nigerian. Comparing this phenomenal figure to 350,000 lines in 1999 before the onset of the GSM revolution which provided one line to 340 Nigerians, tells eloquently of the transformation of the country within just 24 years of the GSM cell phone dispensation.

With respect to the future of the cell phone, the field of possibilities is still very wide. For instance a major benefit of the cell phone is the projection of the computer into hand held convenience. Hence today, the cell phone is more than a mere call machine but an organiser of virtually every aspect of life as is imaginable for some users. The trend towards the future remains the pursuit of its more convenient use including implanting its features on the human body and eliminating carrying it around.

However in all of its past and present utility to mankind, the fact remains that, these first fifty years have been indescribably most beneficial to mankind. In the same context lies the hope that the future of the cell phone will usher in yet more dividends to make the world a better place to live in.