When people want to know who first predicted the age of the smartphone, a few names regularly pop up.
First, there’s Nikola Tesla, who in 1926 foretold that, “through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face-to-face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles. And the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”
Then there’s sci-fi author Isaac Asimov, who’s remembered for his 1964 op-ed in the New York Times in which he claimed communication devices would one day enable people to “see as well as hear the person you telephone.” He also predicted that “the screen [would] be used not only to see the people you call, but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.”
But a name that almost never comes up is Mark R. Sullivan, whose astute predictions came more than a decade before Asimov’s. In the 1950s, Sullivan was acting president and director of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company. He was born in Oakland in 1896, lived in San Francisco with his wife and daughter, and worked his way to the top of his company, starting as a lowly traffic clerk at age 16. He also sat on the board of directors of the American Trust Company. As such, he was well respected and regularly asked to impart his professional wisdom at business conferences and forums.
It was at one of these conferences in Pasadena, California on April 9, 1953, that Sullivan relayed his eerily accurate vision of the future of phones. Tacoma’s News Tribune reported on the speech two days later in an article titled, “There’ll Be No Escape in Future From Telephones.”
