The simple, sturdy pager has had one of the longest, most exciting lives of any electronic device. The first pager-like device, adopted by Detroit's police department in 1928, was used to chase bootleggers during prohibition. Real pagers would appear in hospitals three decades later; when their range got better, first responders were the next to embrace them.
When prices came down in the 1980s, drug dealers were quick to see the possibilities; an entire episode of the TV series The Wire was centered around the device. Schools began banning them, which just made kids want them all the more. And when pagers went two-way, they became a celebrity accessory and Blackberry forerunner that helped usher in our always-on age.
In the smartphone era, the pager is back where it started—deployed pretty much exclusively in the medical industry. If the device can continue to endure, it'll be the cockroach of mobile communication: tiny, tough, and with an unmatched ability to function in emergency conditions.
 PagersJanuary 31, 2019 |
What's the 411?
The simple, sturdy pager has had one of the longest, most exciting lives of any electronic device. The first pager-like device, adopted by Detroit's police department in 1928, was used to chase bootleggers during prohibition. Real pagers would appear in hospitals three decades later; when their range got better, first responders were the next to embrace them.
When prices came down in the 1980s, drug dealers were quick to see the possibilities; an entire episode of the TV series The Wire was centered around the device. Schools began banning them, which just made kids want them all the more. And when pagers went two-way, they became a celebrity accessory and Blackberry forerunner that helped usher in our always-on age.
In the smartphone era, the pager is back where it started—deployed pretty much exclusively in the medical industry. If the device can continue to endure, it'll be the cockroach of mobile communication: tiny, tough, and with an unmatched ability to function in emergency conditions.
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3.2 million: Number of pager users worldwide in the 1980s
64 million: Number of pager users at their height in 1994
15%: Share of US teens with pagers in 1999
5-6 million: Estimated worldwide users as of 2013
1.1 million: Current subscribers to Spok, the largest paging system in the US
85%: Share of hospitals using pagers
$3.5 million: Amount the NHS could save each year by ditching its 130,000 pagers
4.57 billion: Number of mobile phone users worldwide
0: Pager services Japan will have after September 2019, when Tokyo Telemessage will terminate pager service due to lack of demand
Who still has a pager?
The last major users of pagers are also their first major users; in 1950, the Jewish Hospital in New York was the first to put the technology to work. Doctors paid $12 a month (the equivalent of about $120 today) for a six-ounce device that looked like a small walkie-talkie. This first pager was surprisingly robust—it lasted for six months on a single set of batteries and could broadcast three-digit numbers to up to 60 doctors at once.
They were a relief from the intrusiveness and monotony of the hospital intercom, captured in the Three Stooges' famous line "Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard!" from the 1934 short "Men in Black." Pagers could summon doctors with privacy and without a racket. The very first one worked within a 25-mile radius. Many doctors at first hated the idea of being always reachable—but the usefulness proved undeniable.
That's even true today. Pagers use high frequencies to distribute messages, which travel a lot better through buildings, particularly in hospitals that are designed to restrict waves and rays in order to cut down on cellular reception. (They may interfere with medical equipment, though the science on that is surprisingly shaky). Nuclear plants also still use pagers, because their signal can penetrate the thick concrete walls of reactors.
They'll run for weeks on a single battery, and they broadcast to multiple towers, using satellites to relay messages, making them reliable in disasters and useful for first responders. And as doctor Alison Bond wrote in Slate in 2016, while a smartphone is constantly delivering messages of varying importance, doctors have been trained to know a page demands attention now.
Americans still dropped $7 million on new pagers in 2012.
How do pagers work?
Over 70 years, they've evolved a lot. To use the 1950 Reevesound, an operator would pick up a piece of motion-picture film with a doctor's three-digit code and feed it into a transmitting machine, which read it with the kind of sound head found in a movie projector. Doctors checked their pagers every hour; if they heard their code, they called the hospital to get the message.
In 1955, Motorola introduced the Handie-Talkie, which allowed operators to target a single pager. When it vibrated, the user would press a "push to listen" button and receive the message, but it required wiring a whole building. The Pageboy, Motorola's first transistorized, single-tone-only pager (aka "the beeper") arrived in 1964, followed in the mid-'70s by the sleek Pageboy II, which permitted an audio message after the tone. These functions greatly expanded the range and market of the pager, but like the first Reevesound, their range was limited to a 25-mile radius. Not until the 1980s did wide-area paging networks open up.
This coincided with the advent of numeric pagers, the first of which hit the market in 1981 from New York–area Radiofone. After dialing the pager number, the caller entered a callback number or a numeric code (like 1134 2 09, which upside down reads "go to hell"). The company built New York's first cellular network for the pagers, and later introduced the first alphanumeric pagers, which ushered in the era of the pager as pop culture.
Pop quiz An entire pager lingo universe emerged in the 1990s. Which code translated to "Going to the beach"? |
Have a friend who would enjoy our Obsession with Pagers?
"Do you know the importance of a skypager?"
That's the first line of A Tribe Called Quest's "Skypager," off 1991's classic Low End Theory. ("Beeper's goin off like Don Trump gets checks / Keep my bases loaded like the New York Mets.") The song, which arrived four years after SkyTel launched the first nationwide pager network, starts by praising its usefulness for casual hookups, but ends in the frustration of being accessible 24/7.
In 1994, Notorious B.I.G. lamented that "kids younger than me, they got the Sky brand pagers," in reference to their use in the drug trade; they were banned in schools across the US, which brought some outlaw cool to a thing most kids just used to keep in touch with their parents or friends.
In 1995, Motorola introduced the first two-way pager, the Tango, but it only permitted a handful of preset responses to messages. It wasn't until 1997 that its PageWriter 2000, with a QWERTY keyboard, allowed for true texting (and even email and faxes). For a brief moment, the two-way pager was a tech star, with colorful little clamshells in the hands of Shaquille O'Neal, Carson Daly, Russell Simmons, and Jay-Z. But corporate moguls favored the Blackberry, which had recently emerged from Research In Motion's own Interactive Pager, a sign of the revolution to come.
Not only were pagers once essential to tens of millions of users, they were also pretty cool, at least if you go by this cringey 1996 Motorola commercial. Or, as the electronics manufacturer said way back then, "When I shake lose, I home in on cool like a bird-dog, with my Motorola pager."
Poll Pagers: The next retro fashion statement? |
In yesterday's poll about puffers, 33% of you said they're "too athleisurely." The rest of you sport at least one. 📧 Kari wrote: "You missed an interesting side-note to puffers with (sew-it-yourself outdoor gear company) Frostline Kits. In the late 70s I made all kinds of puffer jackets, for me and my family and friends. Frostline had all kinds of kits—I made a backpack for my boyfriend and one for me. I must have made all-in-all a dozen puffer coats before Frostline went out of business."
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