that we could have a phone number for life

Features, such as soothing ringtones, were foreseen by a US engineer

Journalist wrote about features including: touchtone dialling, video calling, voice recognition and small colour screens capable of being used as TVs

It may look like a stopwatch at first glance, but this conceptual ‘phone of tomorrow’ imagined in the 1950s, included many ideas that have now become a reality.

Future technology trends are notoriously hard to predict, but a magazine article penned in 1956 foresaw modern smartphone features.

The journalist, Robert Beason, wrote about features such as touchtone dialing, video calling, voice recognition and small colour screens capable of being used as tiny televisions, built into compact devices.

Scroll down for video

Phone of the future: It may look like a stopwatch, but a concept of a mobile phone devised in the 1950s, includes many features that we take for granted today, including voice recognition and video calling. The 'phone' featured push buttons on one side (left) and showed a photo of a desired contact on the other (right)

His interviewee, Harold Osborne, the retiring chief engineer of American Telephone & Telegraph also foresaw other common features of modern smartphones, such as quick call connections, lighted keypads and soothing ringtones, which were all included in the article published in US magazine, Mechanix Illustrated.

Despite looking like a pocket watch, the illustration in the magazine contains familiar features such as numbered buttons and photos of contacts.

However, Mr Osborne didn’t get everything right. He forecast that every baby around the world would be given a telephone number at birth that would be kept for the entirety of their life.

Harold Osborne, the retiring chief engineer of American Telephone & Telegraph foresaw other common features of modern smartphones, such as quick call connections, lighted keypads and soothing ringtones. Here, a glamorous woman shows how she would use the smart mobile device

The number would be a way of knowing whether that person is alive.

‘If he does not see or hear from him, he will know his friend is dead,’ the engineer concluded.

Mr Osbourne predicted that it would take years for portable phones to be created and that a large part of this work would be achieved at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Mr Beason wrote: ‘Men at Murray Hill are now working on phone equipment you may be using in two, five, ten or 20 years.

The futuristic handset was featured in Mechanix Illustrated magazine (the cover is shown) in 1956

‘The path of research is leading toward the videophone to enable you to see as well as hear your party.’

He believes that adding video equipment to Mr Osbourne’s idea of a watch-sized telephone isn’t far-fetched because the ‘miniaturisation of electronic components already is far advanced,’ with transistors ‘as big as peas’.

Today, we are only just beginning to see the consumer roll-out of smart watches, which can be used to stream video content and images.

Mr Beason also reported that ‘all electronic switching will complete your call a thousand times faster,’ mentioning the advent of ‘robot dialing’ and transmission equipment capable of bringing ‘live telecasts from England and the Continent’.

Other anticipations included voice recognition dialing: ‘Some day you might pick up the receiver of your dial-less phone and simply speak the number wanted,’ he wrote.

The author was also impressed by the notion of an affordable answer machine, which had ‘been a dream for 50 years’ and would inform a businessman of a message and relay a contact’s number and name, negating the need for a secretary, or making her job a lot easier.

Similarly, he wrote: ’The speakerphone is just the ticket for an impatient magnate who dislikes being tied down.

‘It looks like the usual phone except for a row of buttons and some holes in one corner where the microphone is located.

‘A couple of feet away is the loudspeaker, about as big as a cigarette pack. The set allows you to have both hands free while carrying on a conversation.’

As well as noting that making devices smaller was ‘a mania’ in the industry, Mr Beason predicted that the future of solar batteries would be ‘colossal’.

THE FUTURISTIC MOBILE DREAM PENNED IN 1956 This is the introduction of Robert Beason's feature, publishded in Mechanix Illustrated magazine. 'On some night in the future a young man walking along Market Street in San Francisco may suddenly think of a friend in Rome. 'Reaching into his pocket, he will pull out a watch-size disc with a set of buttons on one side. He will punch ten times. 'Turning the device over, he will hear his friend's voice and see his face on a tiny screen, in color and 3-D. At the same moment his friend in Rome will see and hear him. 'The disc will be a telephone, a miniature model equipped for both audio and video service.' Advertisement