The Car Phone

The car phone put a telephone in the automobile decades before one could fit in a pocket. Commercial Mobile Telephone Service began in 1946, with a few channels per city and operator-assisted calls, and cellular networks in the 1980s made permanently installed car phones a genuine, if expensive, convenience. Drawing power from the car battery and using a roof antenna, the console-mounted handset became a 1980s emblem of wealth. Handheld cellular phones offered the same calls anywhere, and Bluetooth integration absorbed the rest; the analog networks the old units relied on shut down by 2008.