By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 1988, The Syracuse Newspapers
I grew up on Dick Tracy's dreams. I knew they would come true.
The other kids played stickball in the sand pit after school.
But I had worlds to build.
Each day I pulled the afternoon paper off the porch and opened
it to the comics page, and there next to Beetle Bailey, the man
with the crew cut and chiseled face carried me away. We went to
the future almost every day.
They were journeys that detoured left and right. They took me
to Allied Radio catalogs and Ratheon parts lists and hearing-aid
stores. I was making myself a Dick Tracy walkie-talkie, the kind
that strapped on your wrist like a watch.
I got halfway to my goal. When I was 11 or 12, I put together
a transmitter small enough to hide in a box of kitchen matches.
It used a tiny vacuum tube and a high-voltage battery to keep
the little coils in the tube glowing. It was a marvel of the 1950s.
But it wasn't a two-way radio. It only sent in one direction.
And I couldn't wear it on my wrist.
The dream never died, but it had lain forgotten in the crush of
decades until recently. By chance, I got a phone call from a friend
who works as an engineer for an electronics company. He was talking
about cellular phones and the radio signals they use.
Radio signals?
Something in my mind turned a page. I could see Dick Tracy talking
on his wrist radio. But it was-it had to be-a phone! Our further
conversation showed how close you and I are to a telephone just
like that-one that we can wear on our wrists or pin on our clothes
like jewelry.
It will surely happen in this decade, I told the engineer.
You're much too cautious, he said. It's bound to happen in a year
or two at most.
The reason? As cellular telephone technology advances, electronics
experts are taking advantage of two important developments.
The first is the industry-wide miniaturization of all the electronic
parts of a cellular phone. This is done through VLSI chips-very-large-scale
integrated circuits that contain millions of transistors and other
parts on a single chip. Such VLSIs are expensive to design but
relatively cheap to make.
The second is the use of a different broadcasting technique. The
method being used now gives relatively long range between the
phone and the transmitter-receivers spotted around the area, but
it requires each cellular phone to send out a strong signal.
The alternate method uses lower power, with closer spacing among
the transmitter-receivers. This is perfect for populated areas,
and it's ideal for trimming the size and weight of the phones.
A cellular phone that does not need to transmit a powerful signal
can get by with lighter circuit elements and smaller batteries.
The engineer cautioned me not to expect such miniature cellular
phones to show up at the stores soon. The technology is almost
ready, he said, but the government has not yet given its approval.
But once that happens, the new systems could be installed in major
urban areas within a relatively short time.
Because they are radios, cellular phones need antennas, and there
is no known way to make antennas smaller than a certain size in
relation to the wavelength of the signal. But a telephone watch-one
that combines a watch, calculator and phone-could possibly use
the watchband for an antenna, and a telephone locket could use
the necklace for the same purpose.
Ultimately, of course, cellular phones could become so tiny that
they could be placed in eyeglass frames or even worn inside the
ear. The microphones could pick up your voice by bone conduction.
Stepping beyond Dick Tracy, we can expect tiny, single-chip cellular
phones to become standard parts of laptop computers. They probably
would have modems built into the chip, giving these future laptops
the ability to communicate with other computers without any sort
of hookup wires.
But that's another subject, and I've got to get back to my engineer
friend. I can hear my watch ringing already.