It took some years before the car telephone became the mobile phone which the two wheels in the logo of the NMT symbol bear witness of. 

The First 25 Years

Once upon a time there were a paltry 7,000 mobile subscribers in Denmark who all had their large, heavy, and unhandy mobile telephone installed in their cars. The year is 1983, a year after the opening of the first fully automatic mobile network, Nordisk Mobil Telefon [Nordic Mobile Telephone], NMT.


Today most Danes are mobile subscribers practically always carrying a turned on mobile telephone weighing only about 100 g, but nevertheless containing countless functions. We are users of all ages - wherever and whenever - and it is difficult to imagines a time when the mobile telephone was usually attached to a man's occupation and never used for making decisions at the refrigerated counter. It is about time we make an effort to secure our knowledge of the first 25 years with the mobile phone. 

Eventually, the hand-held, portable phones were the majority and mobile chat moved out of the cars. Photo fra 1985. 

Do you remember? And have you still got your Phone?

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the first fully automatic mobile telephone network Post & Tele Museum are collecting mobile telephones and stories about why they were acquired and which purposes they served. The NMT telephones were all rendered redundant when the system closed on 1st March 2002.

If you still have your old NMT telephone and can tell us how you used it, we would very much like you to contact us. We are also very interested in hearing more about car radios from before the NMT time, i.e. car transceivers used in connection with the Car Telephone Service which through manual exchanges put car telephone operators in connec-tion with each other or with the landline subscribers.

We are, of course, also interested in collecting your ponder-ous GSM pocket phone from the early 1990's - the telephone you acquired at the price of DKK 1 or less during the "Christ-mas war" of the mobile telephone companies in 1996 or your first folding phone. And together with the telephone we would like to collect your stories about acquirement, user habits, special incidents, etc. Manuals and accessories that have been used together with the telephones are also of interest. See the contact information at the end of the article. 

One of the so far most popular mobile telephones, Nokia 3310, which was launched in Denmark in 2000. 

A Big Danish Mobile Industry

It is our well-founded hope to collect many Danish-produced mobile telephones. The Danish mobile telephone flourished particularly during the first half of the 1980's as a result of the increasing number of subscribers to the world's largest fully automatic mobile network - the NMT. Among the biggest companies in Denmark were Storno and AP Radio, which provided more than 50 % of the Danish subscribers with a mobile telephone. A couple of companies were active even after the opening of the digital GSM network in Denmark in 1992, among them Dancall and Cetelco that each launched one of the first four GSM telephones during the same year. None of the above-men-tioned companies are Danish or produce mobile phones anymore, but we are likewise interested in relics and narratives of their work.

Contact

Regarding collection of mobile telephones please contact registrar Malene Iwersen or curator Jan Hybertz Gøricke on tel. no. 33 41 09 00, or send an e-mail to museum@ptt-museum.dk.

 

"Pioneer" GSM telephone from 1994 . Although it weighed more than half a kilo, it was called a "pocket telephone - for the inside pocket that is. 

The collected phones will be on display in a special exhibition at the Balcony from 28th August 2007, but the collection will continue until December 2007. As well the exhibition as the collection project are part of the Year of Industrial Culture. Read more on www.ik07.dk.