These small boxes allow you to receive messages, sound alerts or telephone numbers using their own radio frequency and therefore without going through mobile telephone networks, which can experience interruptions, connection problems or interception of communications.
This is also one of the selling points of the Spok company, which still manufactures pagers: “Have peace of mind with pagers whose signal penetrates steel and metal, whereas that of a smartphone could be blocked,” boasts the American company on its website.
“Beeper systems represent a more reliable means of communication, for example in the event of a Wi-Fi or telephone network failure,” also assures the manufacturer Discover Systems. While beepers had their heyday in the West in the 80s and 90s – more than 2.3 million people owned them in France in 1998 – their use has persisted today mainly in hospitals, particularly in the United States.
First pager patented in the United States
According to a 2017 study in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, nearly 80% of hospital physicians surveyed used pagers, and half of the messages received through them were related to patient care.
According to Spok, the first pager was patented in the United States in 1949 by inventor Alfred Gross, a pioneer in wireless communication, before being used in a New York hospital.
The term “pager,” however, was officially trademarked in 1959 by Motorola, which was a market leader for decades. According to Spok, 61 million pagers were in circulation worldwide in 1994 before cell phones tolled their death knell.
Motorola’s first pager, the Pageboy 1, created in 1964, allowed an audible alert to be sent by telephone before the technology was perfected and allowed, from the 1980s, to send written messages, not systematically in legal uses. The well-documented series “The Wire” on drug trafficking in Baltimore, in the eastern United States, shows how “pagers” are also used in the sale of narcotics.
