skepticalbip
Contributor
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2004
- Messages
- 7,304
- Basic Beliefs
- Everything we know is wrong (to some degree)
Great numbers of people walk the busy streets of the city staring down into their telephone screens?
People send text messages on their mobile telephones while driving their cars...isn't that risky?
The Star Trek series first aired in 1966 and the "communicator" was a was a "WOW Gee whiz" device at that time - a year after our time traveler left. So it is doubtful that anyone from 1965 would identify the cellphone as a "telephone" but rather as an amazing communications device. A telephone would be, for them, that handset connected to a base station with a rotary dial all connected to a wall outlet. Cellphones would likely be more identified with the military walkie-talkies of the time which were bulky, short range, and only good for contacting a very few stations.