The advancement he was most proud of was a new device about the size of a small typewriter that automatically calculated how long people’s phone calls were.

To put into context just how extraordinary Sullivan’s vision was for the period, three years earlier he appeared in the San Francisco Examiner talking about the latest innovations in telephone technology. Who knows but it may actually translate from one language to another?

It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Tacoma’s News Tribune reported on the speech two days later in an article titled, “There’ll Be No Escape in Future From Telephones.” 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. Sullivan, telephone prophet, as seen in the 'San Francisco Examiner' on July 14, 1950. As such, he was well respected and regularly asked to impart his professional wisdom at business conferences and forums. He also sat on the board of directors of the American Trust 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. In the 1950s, Sullivan was acting president and director of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company. Sullivan, whose astute predictions came more than a decade before Asimov’s. 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 be used not only to see the people you call, but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.”īut a name that almost never comes up is Mark R.

Apple board view files