Tidbits #6 - The Jedward Wide Web

John and Edward Grimes – better known as Jedward - were born on October 16th 1991 … which means that they are about the same age as the Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee posted the very first webpage on the very first website on August 6th 1991 – just 32 years ago. 1991 also gave us the first game featuring Sonic the Hedgehog (Jun 23rd), and the first UK Starbucks coffee shop which opened in May of that year. We saw the demise of the KGB and Pan Am airlibes, and we said goodbye to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (Oct 24th), Theodor Geisel aka Dr Seuss (Sept 24th), French crooner Serge Gainsbourg (March 2nd) and Freddie Mercury (Nov 24th). 

All of which means that, in all likelihood, Freddie Mercury never visited a webpage in his lifetime. 

And Jedward are not quite as mature as Sonic the Hedgehog. 

The UK’s first ever mobile phone (or cell phone) call was made on January 1st 1985 when comedian Ernie Wise made a call from St Katherine’s Dock in London to the headquarters of Vodafone in Newbury, Berkshire. At that time, Vodafone was such a small outfit that their HQ was in an office above an Indian restaurant. 

When ‘Little Ern’ made his pioneering call, mobile phones cost £2000 a time (£7,750 in today's money), had a battery the size of a briefcase with a 20 minute lifespan, and used analogue rather than digital transmission. Consequently, you could listen in on people’s conversations by finding the right frequency on your radio. It took Vodafone nine years to sign up its millionth customer, but only a further 18 months to reach two million. Statista says that we currently have over 16.8 billion mobile devices in use.

It’s been claimed that there are now more mobile phones than toothbrushes. In 2011 this fact was researched by writer Nicole Hall who discovered that there were, on average, 3.2 billion toothbrushes sold each year. And, at the time of her research, there were around four billion mobile phone contracts in existence. Then, in 2021, Jamie Turner of 62nd Marketer attempted to determine the validity of this statement. And it still seems to be true - there are at least a billion more mobile phones than toothbrushes on the planet today. 

Slightly more distressing is the fact that more people have access to a mobile phone than to a loo. 

At least they'll have something to occupy them when they do find one.