It's a beautiful day in the woods. Far off the grid, away from stores, people, or even shelters more stable than a tent, Jeff Wilson is backpacking through deep woods. It's a return to nature that brings him enjoyment and is a complete disconnection from society. But Jeff has no connection to the world at large and in this case, unaware of what is coming.

He is deep in the forest when a loud series of beeps emits from his pocket. The small plastic rectangle continues to sound until Jeff pulls it out and silences it with a push of a button. On it reads an important message: a severe thunderstorm is coming. Armed with this new information, he quickly does a 180 and hurries back to his campsite. Thankful for this heads-up from his roommates, Jeff is thankful he didn't rely on his cell phone. For here in the forest, there is no coverage. No towers to ping his phone nor to get an emergency call out. His roommates reached out to him in the only way that truly always works.

Jeff is still living in a piece of the world most thought had vanished in the era of flip phones and rectangular, smart slabs of glass we all carry around. Jeff's roommates didn't call him. They paged him.

Pre-Cellular

Pagers, commonly called 'beepers', are a product of a bygone era. Once a revolutionary way to get ahold of anyone, they were quickly swept away by the constant march of technology and time. These devices were small plastic rectangles running on a single AA battery. They did one thing: emit a series of loud beeps when another person called its assigned phone number. The idea was first patented in 1949 by Al Gross and the first pager, the Pageboy I, hit the market in 1964.

The concept of a pager was simple. If you needed to alert someone to call you, one would pick up the phone and dial a special number. The call would be picked up by a computerized system and play a series of fast beeping sounds. Then the call would end. For the person making the telephone call, their work was done. However, there were a series of events that single call kicked off. The paging system would locate the pager using a combination of 33 different frequencies. Once the system was able to ping the pager, it would signal it to emit an alert. Generally, this process only took 10-30 seconds, giving the initial caller a short window of time to reach someone. For the owner of the pager, they knew to find a phone and call the person who paged them.

The entire concept was antiquated given the many arrangements a group of people needed to establish in advance. A pager had a single number and did not have a display at first. If you received a 'beep' you had to know it could only come from one person. How else would you know who to call back? Additionally, if you were away from a landline, you had to ensure you had quarters on you at all times and a penchant for locating a payphone in as short a time as possible.

Given the cost of the pager, the service itself, and its immediacy, the devices became ubiquitous in the medical field. A doctor carrying a pager knew to call a central number so they could get an update about a multitude of situations instead of hearing from a single person.

Hello Moto

Telecommunications companies rarely became household names, but Motorola broke that trend. If someone had a pager on them, it likely bore the distinctive M logo from the manufacturer. With their Pageboy I device, the ability to send a page to a person was possible for local areas. Generally, the devices were used on-site in a single location due to their limited range. However, by 1980 over 3 million pagers were in use worldwide, with wide-area paging coming during that decade. This advancement allowed a page to be relayed by radio waves and removed all geographic limitations.

The wide-area technology coincided with one of the pagers' most important advancements within the device itself: a display. It may seem laughable now to imagine these devices not bearing a display. This addition was one that helped break the pager out of its niche into widespread adoption. While only able to only display numbers for many years, the pager would now show you anything the sender entered. This allowed you to give your 'beeper number' to friends & family and let them 'beep' you any time they needed. For these callers, after dialing the pager's number, they would hear a tone and then enter any sequence of digits from their phone. Once done, they would hear a confirmation tone and end the call. Those digits would appear on the device seconds later.

Pagers became commonplace for people working in construction, parents wanting to be reachable by a babysitter while they're out alone, or for anyone else who desired a level of connection to those they felt depended on them.

For the Masses

By 1994 over 61 million pagers were in use and as with most technology, it became cheaper and cheaper over the years. This critical mass was due to devices retailing for less than $100, cheap services like Smart Beep that ran for $2 per month, and parents seeing value in giving pagers to their children in order to have them always reachable. Similar to how an iPhone is a requirement (in a child's eyes) for anyone in middle school, a beeper was seen as cool and a must-have gadget. Smart Beep was the cheapest service on the market and used edgy commercials to push their service.

Once the technology hit the younger crowd, clever ways to relay information were developed using the same 1-9 keypad input. An entire lexicon was developed comprising mostly of 3-digit codes. Teens would assign their friends "IDs" so when they sent a page, it would contain their ID + code. It was very common for a person in a relationship to get a code of "1 143" meaning it was their #1 person (a boyfriend/girlfriend) and 143 being code for "I love you". The 143 were the number of letters in each word of the sentence.

Other codes were 911 indicating to call the person back ASAP, 07734 (hello upside down), 99 for goodnight, and 411 indicating the person had a question. As with all technology that has inherent limitations, it comes as no surprise that an entire generation found ways around the confines of a single display that could only show digits.

Hanging Up

While pagers were ubiquitous, another technology was gaining a foothold: cellular phones. Initially limited to 'car phones' or giant bricks with terrible battery life, the same thing that happened with pagers also happened to cell phones. The technology improved. The networks improved. The service became cheap enough to entice businesses to consider switching their employees over from pagers.

Samsung and Nokia, among others, were developing smaller and smaller phones that became candybar-shaped or flipped closed like a clamshell. Out the gate, these phones could send and receive text messages. The owner didn't need to borrow someone's house phone or fish their pockets for payphone quarters. If someone needed to reach you, they would simply call you instead of using a pager to wait for your inevitable return call. It made sense. Cellular technology removed all of the roadblocks and hassles of carrying a pager.

While pagers continued to improve by upgrading to displays that showed multiple lines of text and even services where you could dictate a message to an operator who then typed it to the pager's owner, it was no match for cell phones. Blackberries soon became commonplace in the same medical and financial environments where pagers thrived. By 2001 Motorola had announced it was no longer going to manufacture pagers. Overnight, Smart Beep folded without much of a warning to its customers. Apparently providing $2/mo beeper service was not a viable business model!

Never Gone

Cell phones are ubiquitous to a level the pager could only dream about. However, even in 2022, pagers are still in use. For junior doctor Ena Liew her Quattro II pager is like holding a piece of history, but without the appeal enjoyed by 90's teens.

It feels extremely archaic to hold a pager tbh, and it’s super limiting! For example: your pager rings when you get a page, but if your inbox is full you won’t get the message.

On my first day of work I asked to be guided on how to use one and everyone said “oh no one teaches you how to use one, it just kinda happens, I still don’t know how to read one” 😂 and that’s still true!

Ena Liew

For Liew, her work environment does not encourage calling one another. This keeps the use case for pagers high in a medical setting. A different situation where pagers seemed to gain traction was for those dealing drugs. Again, as a precursor to the cell phone, it was a way to remain in contact. Because of their storied use for drug dealers to do business, people who still use a pager can get endless jokes about it or actual suspicions.

However, their reliability is what makes pagers have an advantage over cell phones. Jeff Wilson, our off-the-grid enthusiast, has been carrying a pager since 2006. The Application Analyst at Cone Health recalls impressive ways in which a pager has shown its reliability.

The reason we still use pagers is because they work and they work every time. The technology is simple and it will page anywhere we are. For example, I work in radiation oncology. This department has massive radiation shielding vaults the size of a good size studio apartment. The walls of the vaults are 4 feet thick on the sides and 2-3 feet thick on the ceiling of really dense concrete to keep the radiation inside of the vault. This means no signals are coming in either. But I will be damned if the pager does not work in there. It is like magic. No wifi, no cell service but that pager will go off every time.

Jeff Wilson

Getting messages to the likes of Ena or Jeff is even easier these days. Modern-day pager service providers don't even need you to call a special number. In the internet age, it's as easy as loading a website and typing the number into a form. There's even a mechanism to check the status of a page to make sure it's delivered.

The fall into obscurity has taken the pager from instantly recognizable to something that results in funny encounters. Wilson indicated observers have confused the communications device with an insulin pump. However, he's done his part to help educate the next generation about this aging technology.

I was presenting at the tech fair at my son's elementary school about my job and the technology I use to do it with. I am explaining what a linear accelerator does, how we treat patients, and some of the really cool 3D printed stuff we created to treat patients with. Then the pager goes off. (It always goes off.) The kids were really confused about what it was.

Then my conversation shifted way off script to explain to them what a pager is. Behind me, I have all of this really cool technology like 3D printers printing, custom face shields, a model of a linear accelerator and other random stuff and all they want to talk about is this pager! The teacher was like oh wow I have heard of these but never seen one. Made me feel old. It was this rabbit hole of old tech and these 1st graders were acting like I was talking about the Roman Empire or something.

According to TeleMessage there were still 5 million pagers still in use in 2014. While we're 8 years removed from that report, that is 7 years after the launch of the iPhone. Given Liew and Wilson's recounts of how reliable these small devices remain, it's no surprise the pager continues to endure. If you're looking to get your hands on one, the Apollo Al-A25 pager is still for sale on Amazon.