“In the event, it would take nearly eight decades for the first cellphone to arrive on the market, and three more on top of that for them to become indispensable in the West.”
W. K. Haselden drew phones ringing during a wedding, a concert and a run for the train, for the Daily Mirror around 1920. He nailed every annoyance a century early. The futurists of his day were promising flying cars. The cartoonist just assumed people would be rude with new technology, and he was the one who got it right.