The ludicrousness of stemmed wine glasses

In 1989 I answered my first mobile phone call on Oxford Street using a brick-sized Motorola borrowed from work. Several people shouted abuse at me from passing cars.

Back then, it was also rare to make a mobile-to-mobile call. If you did, it was the main topic of conversation for the first few minutes: ‘Where are you?’ ‘On a boat.’ ‘Wow, I’m on a train going through Leighton Buzzard.’ And you’d laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.

Now let’s imagine that, owing to a technological limitation, early cellphones hadn’t offered interconnectivity with the fixed-line network. Adoption might have been delayed by ten years or more. In 1989 people would have known too few cellphone users to make it worthwhile. The same effect did stall the spread of the fax machine. Until hitting critical mass in the mid-1980s, it was underused for decades.