MUMBAI:In August 1991, when Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. ( MTNL ) was building a case for a mobile phone service in Mumbai , they tried to get support from the business community by pointing out how it could use them to dictate letters as they were being driven in their cars.Ashok Rawat of the Mumbai Grahak Panchayat , a consumer rights group, didn’t buy this. Arguing against such an elitist project, he told the Times of India (ToI) that “anyone who can afford a chauffeur can also afford to have his secretary travel in the car with him.” He alleged it was simply a plan for MTNL to make more money (ironically cellphones would undermine MTNL).It is possible sceptics will have similar reaction at the news that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is allowing wi-fi and mobile services on planes (specifically noting business jets and executive aircraft). Wouldn’t anyone who needed this so imperatively for work be able to afford their own jet? And did the rest of us really need to have airplane cabins, which are now among the few mobile-free spaces we still interact with, be drowned in the sound of conversations all around?But the history of communications tells us that telephony and travel have long been closely linked. No sooner had we figured out how to send sound over wires that we wanted to go wireless as well, all the better to talk in transit.Almost 110 years back, a boat docked in Bombay to a huge amount of interest. The American yacht Lysistrata was one of the most technically advanced of its time, even having, as ToI recalled excitedly in early 1909, “a wireless telephone and we learn that actual demonstrations of the system were to have been given in Bombay around this time, but have not taken place owing to illness incapacitating the engineers who came out to set up the apparatus.” This disappointment didn’t stop ToI printing a long piece on the wonders of going wireless.Unlike telegraphy, which required knowing Morse code, wireless telephony could be done by anyone with access to the apparatus which “can even be stowed in a trunk and carried on a motor car, ready at any time to send a message for scores of miles.”The writer marvelled at how it could be used on trains and ships and quoted a US admiral saying, “It will be very pleasant for me to be able at all times to call up any man of the fleet and say, ‘Halloo’ to him.” What sailors might feel at having to deal with a chatty admiral at all hours isn’t recorded.After the Lysistrata sailed away it took some time before wireless telephony took off in the city, but when it did ToI was there. In 1921, wireless was used to send the results from the Poona races: “Within a few seconds of the horses passing the post, the results were known to the receivers on the roof of the Post Office; within a few minutes they were posted on a board outside the offices of the Times of India, a few minutes later they had been set up in type by the printers and copies taken off for distribution.”This was regular radio transmission and, as ToI acknowledged in a follow-up piece, conversations could be picked up by anyone with a receiver (much like ham radio today): “if the wireless telephone were as commonly used as the wire telephone, then the babel of the Bombay bazaar would be as the silence of the graveyard compared to the confusion that would be caused by many voices in competition.”Still, ToI looked cheerfully forward to a future where truly personal conversations were possible using wireless, especially since “it is so neat and compact that a small lorry is all that is necessary for transport.” And it eagerly reported even further breakthroughs like a new American wireless phone “operated with current from the batteries and generator of a motor car and transmitting and receiving from the top of the windshield to the radiator cap…”In the decades that followed, advances in wireless telephony, on ships, cars and trains, continued to be reported approvingly, even if some of the uses it was being put to now seem a bit dubious.In 1930, for example, ToI described the use of ship-to-ship phones by Antarctic whalers: “Prior to the invention of wireless telephony in this arduous industry it sometimes happened that one whaling vessel would discover a whole school of whales while others sought in vain. Nowadays a telephone call across the Southern Seas concentrates all the fleet immediately on the site of the rich hunting area…”All these developments were literally far from India. It was only in 1970 that the prospect of travelling telephony came up. In March that year, ToI reported that passengers on the famous Brindavan Express between Madras and Bangalore would have the chance to be “connected telephonically to the outside world through the train’s microwave communication system.” In that same year it was announced that the Fifth Five-Year Plan was allocating Rs 9.5 crore for telephone accessories “including the manufacture of telephones to be fitted in cars.” Since this was a time when even getting a basic phone was quite a feat, the chance of car phones taking off seemed mostly wishful.Even 13 years later, in 1983, when union minister of communications VN Gadgil made a fresh announcement about phones on trains, he provided a more realistic picture of the times when he noted disapprovingly that he had learned that some families on Malabar Hill “had as many as six telephones per family.” This was why he was proposing a one telephone per family policy.It was only around 1990 that mobile services really started. Delhi led the way with car phones with a service linked to the Jor Bagh telephone exchange, available for an initial deposit of Rs40,000 and a monthly fee of Rs2,000. This was quite a sum for the time, and when coupled with the admission that the signal grew increasingly faint the further one went from Jor Bagh, it isn’t surprising that in August 1991ToI reported that the service only had 177 subscribers.A few years later the Rajdhani introduced a train phone relayed through the INMAR-SAT link, soon followed by Mumbai’s Western Line.A ToI report in 1996 gave a mournful story of a journalist who was one of the first to use it, calling her editor in excitement, only to be told that there was a death in her family and she should get off at the next stop. But there was also a happier story of a lady who, when found she had left her train pass at home, used the phone to get her husband to bring it to Mumbai Central station to show to the ticket checker!But cellphones as we know them today were spreading rapidly abroad by then, and soon would in India as well. And this, finally, raised the problem of how to handle talking on them in public. Judith Martin, the American journalist who writes the wonderful Miss Manners column, wrote in 1997, tongue in cheek, about sympathising with cellphone owners: “There is hardly any more public wallflower than the person who is obviously lugging around telephone equipment that never seems to ring.”Yet, Martin explained, “etiquette favors people who are actually there in the flesh over disembodied voices – a principle that most telephone devotees have failed to master.” There was nothing wrong in bringing and talking on a cellphone, but there was in “intruding on others, or neglecting others, in order to do so.” Even using a phone while dining out alone was wrong “because that pesky old rule about not talking with one’s mouth full applies.”Martin was clearly fighting a losing battle on mobiles, which is why some people felt that technology was the answer to this technological problem. In 1999, the Economist examined systems like an Israeli company’s device to block mobile phones in limited areas. The other concept taking off, in Europe and Australia, was of quiet coaches in trains where travellers abided by nocellphone-use rules.Quiet coaches were popular with travellers, but less so with railway companies. Policing them becomes a problem for train staff, who get drawn into disputes due to people who don’t understand the policy, or who aren’t quiet enough for other commuters. Earlier this year, Virgin Trains announced it was scrapping first class quiet coaches because, it said, only 9% of travellers wanted them – leading to furious protests from travellers who said they really needed the service.The writer Sara Maitland passionately defends this need in A Book of Silence, a meditation on how to live in a noisy world. She explains how medieval theologians argued that the Devil tried to tempt us away from God, or really connecting with another person, by constantly distracting us with other people: “The mobile phone, then, seems to me to represent a major breakthrough for the powers of hell… With a mobile, a person is never alone and is never entirely attentive to someone else.”Flying in a plane is one of the few times where we are still, relatively, alone, each person in his or her seat and, perhaps not unconnected, literally away from the earth. Even for those who don’t believe in the idea of a heaven above us, this disconnection and the fragility we feel as we speed through the air in a metal tube is a powerful impetus towards personal meditation, however brief and banal.Most of us, of course, quickly distract ourselves with an inflight movie or magazine, but the reality, and value, of those moments may be reason enough not to want to dilute them by the diabolical distraction of inflight phones.