Eighty years ago today, April 1, 1945, Radio Craft magazine introduced what is properly the ancestor of the modern cell phone. It was the next logical progression after the walkie talkie and the handie-talkie, namely the visie-talkie.

The extreme miniaturization was possible due to the elimination of a needless step in television, namely, scanning. The article correctly pointed out that the human eye, just like a TV camera, contains a lens. But that’s where the similarity ends, since the TV camera has a complicated scanning mechanism. The human eye has a retina, and the article explains how this was duplicated with the use of condensinators.

Undoubtedly, the idea was put on hold due to the war, and not used again for many decades. But eighty years ago, this device demonstrated that convenient handheld video communication was possible.