Not long ago I was looking through some of my grandfather's papers when I came across a newspaper clipping from the front page of the Denver Post dated August 20, 1946. The main upper fold headline, in all caps, was “RADIO-PHONE HOOKUP BEGUN IN COLORADO.” The article described an experimental project carried out by Mountain Bell, then the local telephone company in Colorado. It dealt with the provision of radio-based telephony to residents of Cheyenne Wells, a small town on the high plains of eastern Colorado, near the Kansas border (Figure 1.1). The article started by stating: “For the first time anywhere in the worldwide Bell system, that grand old institution, the party line ‘went radio’ at Cheyenne Wells, Colo., Tuesday noon.” While there had been radio-based communication using Marconi's wireless radio for some time prior to this, here was radio-based telephony being applied to the needs of common individuals. The technology was not being used to send messages from ships or to broadcast baseball games, as in the case of commercialized radio stations. Rather it was being applied to the mediation of interaction between private individuals. Indeed this was one of the ancestors of modern radio-based mobile telephony. 1 1 In this book, the terms mobile telephone and mobile telephony are used as synonymous with cellular telephone and cellular telephony, the terms more commonly used in the United States. I prefer the former, for a couple of reasons. First, mobile telephone is the popular form of reference in many countries. In addition, cellular telephony refers to a technology, whereas mobile telephony perhaps better reflects the social dimensions of the technology.