Calif. Passes Cell Phone Warning Law--Is It Needed?
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"Joel, this is Marty Cooper, I'd like you to know that I'm calling you from a cellular phone." Exactly 40 years ago, on April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper placed this call -- the first ever on a cell phone -- to Joel Engel, his rival at AT&T’s Bell Labs.
40 Years of the Cell Phone: Photos
"Joel, this is Marty Cooper, I'd like you to know that I'm calling you from a cellular phone." Exactly 40 years ago, on April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper placed this call -- the first ever on a cell phone -- to Joel Engel, his rival at AT&T’s Bell Labs. Cooper, now 85, made history in downtown Manhattan using the bulky prototype he had developed.
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Cooper's prototype arrived on the market a decade later at the staggering price of $3,995. Designed by Rudy Krolopp, it was known as the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, or simply "the brick.” Featuring 20 large buttons and a long rubber antenna, it measured about 11 inches high, weighed almost 2 pounds, provided one hour of battery life and could store 30 phone numbers.
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Released in 1984, Nokia’s Mobira Talkman was advertised as one of the first transportable phones. It was sold for use both in and out of a car -- if you could lift it. Nokia's concept evolved in 1987 with the handheld mobile Mobira Cityman 900. Weighing 28 ounces, it was one of the lightest phones at that time and cost 24,000 Finnish marks ($5,178).
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Ahead of its time, the Motorola MicroTAC was the smallest available phone when it was released in 1989. Featuring the flip-phone form later adopted by the fashionable StarTAC, the first clamshell cellular phone, the MicroTAC was 9 inches long when open and weighed only 12.3 ounces.
Motorola Mobility, LLC
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Launched in 1992 -- also when the first text message arrived -- the Nokia 101 was the first commercially available GSM mobile phone. Although it lacked the famous Nokia ringtone, introduced in 1994, it featured a monochrome display and memory for 99 phone numbers. Its design anticipated the successful "candy bar” phones.
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Released in 1993 as a joint creation of IBM and BellSouth, this was the first smartphone. A fax machine, a PDA, a pager and a mobile phone, the IBM Simon featured no physical keys, but used a touchscreen and optional stylus. Amazingly, it included applications such as games, email, a notepad, calculator, world clock, address book and a calendar. It only sold in the United States, for $899.
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Launched in 1999, this was the first mobile phone with integrated GPS. Featuring a large grayscale LCD screen, it offered a 12-channel GPS navigator and maps to trace position. It also sent coordinates via text messages to a list of emergency numbers and featured a "friend find” service to track other Benefon Esc users.
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Launched in 2000, the Samsung SPH-M100 Uproar holds its place in history as the first mobile phone capable of storing and playing MP3 files.
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Cell phone photography arrived in 2000, with Samsung's SCH-V200, a VGA-camera-equipped phone. Released in South Korea, it featured a digital camera with a 180-degree rotating lens and a maximum resolution of 352 x 288 -- a far cry from the 41-megapixel camera phone that Nokia will release in European markets in May.
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Motorola brought contemporary design to mobile phones with the Razr V3 in 2004. Thin, trendy and stylish, it featured a VGA camera, quad-band compatibility and Bluetooth support. The phone became an icon. According to Motorola, more than 110 million units sold worldwide.
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The launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007 changed everything. With its unique design, easy-to-use operating system and a multitude of apps to download, the multi- touchscreen phone set the standard for all cell phones to come.
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Once an accessory for the privileged, Martin Cooper's vision is now a staple of life. Today the world has nearly as many mobile phone subscriptions as inhabitants. Indeed, 6 billion people, out of the world's estimated 7 billion, have access to mobile phones.
Ildar Sagdeje/Wikimedia Commons
Last week Berkeley, Calif. became the first American city to pass a measure requiring that cell phones be sold with a health warning about the exposure of users to radio frequency radiation.
Sciencetimes.com reportedthat “The proposal was passed by a vote of 9-0 and when it goes into effect this summer it will be the first safety ordinance of its kind in the country. Cellphone retailers will be required to include a city-prepared notice along with the purchase of any new cellphone, informing consumers of the minimum separation distance a cellphone should be held from the body.”
The measure, which has been called a “right to know law,” may be challenged by the cell phone industry on the basis that it violates free speech by forcing retailers to include warnings they may not necessarily agree with.
Consumers certainly have a right to know about potential dangers of the products they use, but in this case the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports that idea that cell phones are harmless. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, has found no evidencethat cell phones cause cancer, noting that “we do not have the science to link health problems to cell phone use.”
Scientists doubt that cell phones can harm the body for several reasons, including that there is no known mechanism by which radio frequency radiation or electromagnetic fields (EMFs) can cause cancer. Not all radiation is equally harmful; radio waves (such as those emitted by cell phones), like sunlight, are a form of non-ionizing radiation and are considered harmless. Ionizing radiation, such as that found X-rays, can cause cancer.
Furthermore the electromagnetic fields generated by cell phones are not strong enough to break the molecular and chemical bonds in human cells, and therefore can’t damage human cells the way ionizing radiation can.
The following is an excerpt of a typical conclusionpublished in a scientific journal about the links between EMFs, cell phones and health: “Epidemiologic research shows a low degree of association, inconsistency and missing dose-effect relations. A biologic mechanism of action is still debatable. No harm to human health has been shown. Conclusion: There is no scientific basis as to the harmful effects of EMFs on human health.”
In fact just flying in an airplane (often for hours at a time) exposes you to far more radiationthan using a cell phone.
Nonetheless, public concern over cell phones has been around for decades, fueled by alarmist news stories and celebrities expressing concerns (singer Sheryl Crow, for example, has claimed that her cell phone use may have contributed to brain tumors).
What Effects?
As a practical matter the Berkeley law will likely have little effect other than to falsely suggest that cell phones are dangerous. There’s no harm done in reminding consumers about the recommended use of cell phones, but of course warning labels are routinely ignored on countless products from Q-tips (don’t put them in your ears) to tires (check the air pressure in all four tires and the spare at least once a month).
The measure is unlikely to deter anyone from buying or using cell phones, which have become ubiquitous.
Indeed, one interesting aspect to the concerns over the health dangers of cell phones is that the widespread fear has done little to stem the popularity of the product. Typically when the public is concerned about the safety of a product, they reduce (or completely stop) their use of it—for example when fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathyhit Great Britain in 1996, beef consumption more or less stopped. Or, to use a more recent example, the so-called “pink slime” beef additivein American food dropped dramatically as restaurants and schools scrambled to remove the product from their meat.
In a 2006 study of cell phone concernspublished in the journal “Public Understanding of Science,” Frances Drake noted that “a curious exception to this pattern is the mobile phone. Despite various health concerns and numerous local campaigns against mobile phone masts highlighted in the media, phone sales remain buoyant” in the United Kingdom (and indeed around the world).
So while many people claim to be concerned about cell phones, few are willing to give them up, though some consumers have chosen to use earpieces instead of holding the cell phones to their heads as they speak; others have purchased special so-called “EMF shields” that can be inserted into cell phones and allegedly block harmful electromagnetic waves (though consumer groups say there’s no evidence they are effective).
In fact the main effect of the Berkeley warning will likely be to benefit the manufacturers of ineffective “cell phone radiation shields.”
Though there’s little evidence that cell phones cause cancer, they are a significant health threat because of the role they play in distracted driving accidents and deaths: “At any given daylight moment across America, approximately 660,000 drivers are using cell phones or manipulating electronic devices while driving,” according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
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