Pager history

1921: The first-pager like system was used by the Detroit Police Department when they successfully put a radio-equipped police car into service.
1949: The very first telephone pager device was patented by Al Gross and was used by New York City’s Jewish Hospital starting in 1950. Even though it wasn’t yet called a pager, the device had already found one of its primary niches: critical communications. Despite Gross’ many innovations (the walkie-talkie and CB radio in addition to the pager, among others), all of his patents expired by the 1970s. But he didn’t hold any resentment that he never profited from his inventions. “They have “permeated our society,” he said in 2000, a year before his death, “and I’m delighted.”

1959: The term “pager” was coined by Motorola.
1960: John Francis Mitchell combined elements of Motorola‘s walkie-talkie and automobile radio technologies to create the first transistorized pager.
1964: Motorola began its 40-year reign as the dominant leader in the paging space with the introduction of the first consumer tone-only pager, the Pageboy I.For example, a physician would know he should go directly to the ED or call the hospital operator for further information.

1970s: Tone and voice pagers were invented—after the tone, the pager relayed an audio message. This was a step forward from the tone-only pager because the recipient was immediately given more information, such as “Code Blue in ICU.”
1980: There were about 3.2 million pager users worldwide, but paging still had a limited range (local-area pagers), and were primarily used for critical communications on a specific site, i.e., clinicians within the hospital.

1990s (late): Two-way pagers, or pagers that included QWERTY keyboards, were introduced so message recipients could respond to the page directly from the device. Many major hospitals and health systems still employ two-way paging, but one-way pagers remain more popular.

1995: Motorola introduced the world’s first two-way pager, the Tango two-way personal messaging pager. It allowed users to receive text messages and e-mail, and reply with a standard response. It also could be connected to a computer to download long messages.

1996: Research In Motion (now known as BlackBerry) introduced the Inter@active Pager, which allowed users to receive and send messages thanks to its full keyboard and graphical display.