oday we tell the forgotten story of the first pager.

Although a few cities had pager-like devices for their police and firefighters as early as 1921, ordinary citizens couldn't use them. The creator of the first commercial pager service was Sherman C. Amsden (1889-1958), a native of Michigan who served as a U.S. Army Air Force pilot in both world wars.

One night in the early 1920s, Amsden had a family emergency and needed his doctor immediately, but the physician couldn't be reached; the doctor was not in his office and he couldn't afford a secretary to answer his phone. This experience inspired Amsden, then living in New York City, to start one of the first telephone answering companies, Telanserphone. Originally intended just for doctors, here's how the Telanserphone service worked: A subscriber who expected to be away from his telephone (playing golf, seeing a movie, taking a shower, etc.) would notify Telanserphone. If anyone called during the subscriber's absence, a Telanserphone operator would write down a message. The subscriber could then call the company at any time or from any location to hear the messages he missed.

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Click the image above to see drawings of Amsden's pager.

Amsden's next idea, which seems so ordinary in the present era of wireless technology, was in fact brilliantly creative. Instead of requiring subscribers to call Telanserphone to find out if they received messages, Amsden wanted a way to alert subscribers that they had messages. Working with inventor Richard R. Florac (1901-1991), Amsden developed the first commercially available pager. The pager was offered to his company's subscribers for a fee of $11.50 a month.

Here's how it worked. Every Telanserphone subscriber with a pager was assigned a three-digit code number. When a Telanserphone operator took a message for a subscriber, the company would play a voice-recording of that subscriber's code number on the company's high-frequency radio transmitter. The code number, perhaps recorded on magnetic tape, would be repeatedly played on a loop, along with all the other code numbers of subscribers with messages waiting at Telanserphone. Each pager was basically just a small battery-powered radio receiver locked onto the Telanserphone frequency, so when the subscriber held the pager up to his ear he would listen for his code number to know whether a message was waiting for him.

On October 15, 1950, a doctor became the first person to receive a pager signal from Telanserphone.

Amsden started a new company, Aircall, Inc., for his pager business. Within two years, Aircall had 400 subscribers, including doctors, salesmen, detectives, plumbers and undertakers

really cool... looks like there are some small battery powered tubes....