This is a day that has its precedents, just as it will have its consequences — in Finland. And if it is still, for now, a Finnish day, it will not be long before it becomes a global one, casting its shadow across every country.
The day I have in mind is the 1st of this month, because on that date the Finnish government announced the making of the last telephone call on a landline. From that point on, the landline became a kind of memory among Finns — though it had certainly, not long before, been a living part of every Finnish person's life.
We recall that the first call ever made on a mobile phone took place in New York on 3 April 1973. The image of the American engineer Martin Cooper, who made that call, has never left the collective memory. He made it to a rival engineer named Joel Engel, telling him that he was speaking from a mobile phone, not a landline. Cooper was working at Motorola at the time.
The mobile device in his hand was unbelievably large. One description of its size compared it to a brick.
We can, of course, imagine what it would have been like had that device stayed the same size, and every mobile-phone owner been required to carry something that bulky. Those who saw it in its original form surely could not have imagined that it would evolve into the shapes and colours it has taken on today, after passing through every stage of development from that moment to this. Equally, many among us must have wished that the landline could have stayed just as it was — because we knew it, grew fond of it, and loved it, and it gave us memories we are reluctant to leave behind.
From that year, 1973, the mobile phone began to advance, and with every step it took — regrettably — it came at the expense of the landline. To be precise, every step forward it made was subtracted from the landline's remaining lifespan.
The decision by Finland's telecommunications authority to end its landline service means nothing other than that the mobile phone has taken its final step across Finnish soil. And that step was merely the sum of all the steps the mobile phone had taken since 3 April 1973 in New York, all the way to 1 July in Finland — and then, God willing, on to the rest of the world.
Some of us are still taken by nostalgia for the days of the landline — the "dial phone," as it is sometimes called — and that nostalgia only deepens when we see it in old dramatic works broadcast on television. Its ring had a particular resonance; it carried, and still carries, many of us back to days when the landline would ring and the children of the household would race to answer it.
When this telephone first arrived in the Egyptian village, in its earliest days in Egypt, there was only one in the entire village — in the home of the village headman. There was no other telephone in the village. No one could receive or make a call except through the headman's house, by going to him and asking permission to take an incoming call or to place one.
For years, the landline and the mobile phone wrestled with each other and raced against each other. The hope was — and remains — that both might continue to exist side by side. But the news that came to us from Finland dissolves much of that hope.
That hope rested on the assumption that no new medium ever completely abolishes an older one. In the media, for example, the newspaper survived the arrival of radio; when television appeared, the newspaper and radio both survived; and when digital media swept over us, we lived to see newspapers as they always were, radio as we always knew it, and the small screen as we continued to follow and enjoy it. True, the reach of the newspaper, radio, and television is not what it once was — but all three exist, they endure, and they have their audiences.
If there is one thing those who used the landline will miss, it is the privacy it offered its owner — something the mobile phone does not provide. Many among us will be nostalgic for those days. The page that Finland has turned, by closing the chapter on the landline, is a page dear to every citizen there who lived through or used that telephone. It is a page that will remain in people's memory, and its owner will continue to recall it — and with it, the days he lived and wished would last.
The landline telephone, despite its retreat, remains a source of nostalgia, and its disappearance from people's lives is the disappearance of much that is beautiful in the human experience.