Mobiles in 1928

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by rcscwc, Nov 1, 2010.

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  1. rcscwc Registered Senior Member

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    Mobiles in 1928



    [Got it on email. Can't verify]



    Chaplin film shows woman using mobile

    London: A Charlie Chaplin film clip showing a woman using a mobile phone has left viewers stumped.

    London: A Charlie Chaplin film clip showing a woman using a mobile phone has left viewers stumped.

    The baffling scene is found in the extras section of Charlie Chaplin`s 1928 movie ‘The Circus’, Daily Mail reported Wednesday. It shows members of the public attending the premiere of the film at Manns Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

    The footage shows an older woman dressed in a coat and hat with her hand held up to the left-hand side of her face as she talks.

    There is no one around for her to be speaking to apart from a suited man who strides on ahead at the beginning of the shot.

    Even her gestures and behaviour as she "talks" will be eerily familiar to modern-day viewers as she appears to stop, mid-sentence, during her apparent conversation.

    The bizarre anachronism was unearthed by film buff George Clark on his Charlie Chaplin box set.

    He says he has shown it to more than 100 people and still no one can come up with a convincing explanation.

    Some viewers have suggested she is listening to a portable radio close to her face, although this would not explain why she appears to be talking.

    Others say she may be displaying signs of schizophrenia and covering her face to hide the fact that she is talking aloud to herself.

    It has also been suggested that she is simply trying to hide her face from the camera so she is not filmed.

    The first device that could be likened to a mobile phone was Motorola`s original `Walkie-Talkie` which was developed in the 1940s, but that was the size of a man`s arm and still came more than a decade after the Chaplin film.

    IANS
     
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  3. phlogistician Banned Banned

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    And you decided to repost it without even looking for a YouTube clip, ....
     
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    So it doesn't really show a woman using a mobile phone. It merely shows a woman acting in a way which we--eighty years later--can only identify as the behavior of a person using a mobile phone. Whatever she was doing, people don't do it any more so we don't recognize it.

    Let's take Sherlock Holmes's advice and begin this problem-solving session by "eliminating the impossible." There were no mobile phones in 1928 so we must immediately dismiss the first explanation as impossible.

    Now, does anybody have a more reasonable explanation?
    And apparently it doesn't show that hand clearly enough to see whether she's holding something and, if so, what. I'm sure someone seeing this clip in 1956 would not have jumped to the conclusion that she must be using a cellphone, because there were none in 1956.
    Maybe she was talking to him and he walked away, and she figured he could still hear her.

    So when's the last time you talked to yourself? Are you disciplined enough to not do it when someone might be looking? I've always said that one of the reasons pets are so popular is that it gives us an excuse to talk to ourselves.

    In my admittedly not very scholarly observations, I notice that people who are really good communicators tend to talk to themselves a lot. It keeps us in practice. We even rehearse things we plan to say in meetings so we can be more persuasive.
    And I've got a tortilla with a splotch on it that my friends say looks just like St. Mary... even though we have no portraits of her and no one knows what she looked like.

    There's no limit to the human imagination. The first thing we do is try to make something strange appear comfortably normal. That lady can't be talking to a Hogwarts student wearing the Cloke of Invisibility. She must have a cellphone.
    Give me a break! How many of those really bright people know when the portable radio was invented? I had one of the primitive transistorized "portable" radios in the mid 1950s. Yes it was light enough to carry, but it was almost as big as a laptop computer. There was no way to conceal one. Pocket-size models with earphone jacks were just around the corner and did not exist in 1928. Earlier vacuum-tube models used by the military and police qualified as "mobile" because they were battery-powered, but "portable" was really stretching it. They were large and bulky and you couldn't hide one behind your head, even if you could lift it that high.
    I gather this is a silent movie so how do we know she was talking aloud?
    Lots of reasonable suggestions that do not involve anachronistic technology.
     
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  7. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    It was an old fashion hearing aid.
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    A trumpet? Rather hard to hide!
     
  9. kriminal99 Registered Senior Member

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    Maybe she knew Tesla. I have heard he demoed an rc car at one of his little shows.
     
  10. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    If she is talking to a mobile phone you may also ask which network she is using.
     
  11. Emil Valued Senior Member

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    Something like this?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!




    Or something more modern like this?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


     
  12. Gremmie "Happiness is a warm gun" Valued Senior Member

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    Hell, in 1928 a "mobile phone" just meant you took your house phone with you when you moved to a new home.

    Of course, it didn't mean you'd have phone service in the town/city that you moved to.
     
  13. woowoo Registered Senior Member

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    maybe she was an alien talking to the mothership.
     
  14. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Amateur folk singer.
    "Ow, something just flew up and hit me in the face".
    Crackpot.

    Lots of possible explanations...
     
  15. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Occam's Razor, one of the cornerstones of the Scientific Method, requires us to test the simplest explanation first. (He is usually misquoted, but he did not say that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. He was merely pointing out that it will be the fastest and easiest to test and dismiss if it's wrong, rather than possibly wasting ten years disproving the most bizarre explanation.)

    Dy offers several quite simple and unremarkable explanations, and others have been suggested in the course of this thread. Why not start our scientific examination of this phenomenon with those? Can anyone disprove any of them, much less all of them? I've been caught talking to myself more than once; hopefully it's never been captured on film or video!

    To suggest that she must be in possession of a secretly created prototype of a technology which did not come into existence until half a century later, was based on science and engineering that were only a gleam in the eyes of a few futurists and science-fiction writers, and then nonchalantly allowed herself to be photographed using it, at a time when war was on the horizon and this would have been a closely-guarded secret, is truly an extraordinary assertion. This brings into play another cornerstone of the Scientific Method, the Rule of Laplace: Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat them with respect. What is the evidence for this outlandish suggestion? The fact that other more mundane and believable explanations do not have any evidence in the form of obvious clues, blueprints, superimposed red arrows or newspaper accounts, does not in itself serve as evidence that something incredibly unlikely is, therefore, somehow made more likely.

    Ridiculous is still ridiculous!

    The splotch on that one tortilla, out of the trillions of tortillas that were made this year, is surely an accidental and coincidental arrangement of burned dough. It is not an image of a person who lived 2,000 years ago, of whom we have no portraits to compare it to!
     
  16. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    First thing to do is to check if the woman is in the original film. Could be a hoax.
     
  17. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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  18. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    I said that but I was ridiculed.
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The Ear Wax Museum has the best chronology of hearing aid technology I could find, complete with photos. The problem with the early electronic hearing aids was the size of batteries in those days. Even though they had developed earpieces that were barely concealable, especially behind a woman's long hair, the batteries were almost too bulky to carry. This site claims that the first truly portable hearing aid wasn't marketed until the 1930s.

    Nonetheless, if this lady was married to a scientist who could have provided her with a laboratory prototype at the time this movie was made, that would easily explain the way she appears in this movie clip. Her listing to port could be caused by an enormous battery in a shoulder bag. This is far more plausible than having a laboratory prototype of a cell phone, which uses technologies that had not even been thought of yet!
     
  20. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Bah!
    She was receiving telepathic messages from the Planet Zog.
    Isn't it obvious?
     
  21. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    I tell you what's rather amusing is how everybody online that's talked about this "Sees what they want to see". I mean it's even crept onto the IMDB site.

    One says "Woman talking on mobile phone" another states "A large mobile device". To be perfectly honest I can't see any device, just a hand in partial clench. (Incidentally it's suggested not to come from the Actual Chaplin film but a Promotional film about the Chaplin film)

    Promotional films would often be taken outside of where the films were being debued. The people walking passed in the film aren't extras they are actually people that lived in the area.

    This means that there was a likelihood that some people might shy away from the camera by covering their face. They might even talk to the cameraman while they walk past.

    Now that might explain why she was talking and why she had a hand up (if indeed she was a she), but some will still ask "what was she clenching?", well back in the 1920's people use to actually have to work for a living, the woman in question might of got a form of Arthritis from using a scrubbing brush or even using a washboard, this would cause a persons hand to clench slightly as a default rest posture.
     
  22. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    Or she was just a bit mental.
     
  23. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    A circa 1950 movie set in the Roman Empire had a centurion wearing a wrist watch & actually checking the time. He was in a hardly noticeable position far from the scene's center of interest.

    That one is easy to explain.
     
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