The history
70 years from a doctor's radio bleep to India's pager boom, and the hospitals that still carry one.
After the Second World War, engineers shrank radios into things you could carry. The pager was the simplest: a receiver that beeped when someone wanted you. It spread from hospitals to business people to teenagers, learned to show numbers and then words, and for a few years in the 1990s it was how cities from Tokyo to Mumbai stayed in touch. Mobile phones and SMS replaced it for most people, but where a message must get through, many still wear one.
1949
First telephone pager system
Al Gross, United States
1956
First hospital radio paging ('bleep')
Multitone, St Thomas' Hospital, London
1964
First consumer pager
Motorola Pageboy I
1981
Pager code made a world standard
POCSAG (Radiopaging Code No. 1)
1995
First two-way pager
Motorola Tango
1995
First licensed paging in India
Private operators in licensed cities
1949 – 1963
Al Gross's first telephone pager, the hospital 'bleep' in London and New York, and Motorola's name for it.
1949
Al Gross, who had already built walkie-talkies, turned his two-way radios into one-way receivers that could signal a person from a telephone. He aimed it at doctors, who at first worried the beeping would upset patients.
Why it mattered. It set the pattern for every pager since: a pocket receiver that is called, not a phone that calls.
1956
Multitone, founded by the inventor Joseph Poliakoff, installed a closed-loop radio paging system at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Doctors carried small receivers that bleeped when they were wanted, instead of being called over loudspeakers.
Why it mattered. Britain's doctors still call a pager a 'bleep' because of it.
1960
c. 1960
Motorola engineers under John F. Mitchell combined ideas from walkie-talkies and car radios to make a transistorised pager, small enough to carry. The same team later helped build the first handheld mobile phone.
Why it mattered. Transistors made pagers pocket-sized and battery-friendly.
1962
The Bell System showed its Bellboy radio paging system at the Seattle World's Fair. A beep told the wearer to find a telephone and call in.
Why it mattered. The phone company itself was now selling paging to the public.
1964 – 1989
Consumer tone pagers, Japan's Pocket Bell, the POCSAG standard, and screens for numbers and then words.
1964
Motorola's Pageboy I was a tone-only pager with no screen and no memory. When it beeped, the wearer knew to call the office or go straight to the emergency room. Some accounts date its launch as late as 1974.
Why it mattered. It began Motorola's decades as the world's biggest pager maker.
1976
The British Post Office, then running the UK's phones, gathered engineers from several companies to design a common digital code for paging, so any maker's pager could work on any network.
Why it mattered. A shared standard let paging spread across countries.
1980
early 1980s
Numeric pagers added a small display that showed the caller's phone number. Around 1980 there were said to be about 3.2 million pagers in use worldwide.
Why it mattered. You no longer had to phone the office just to find out who wanted you.
1981
February 1981
The international radio committee accepted the Post Office code as Radiopaging Code No. 1, later ITU-R Recommendation M.584. It sends 32-bit codewords with 10 check bits, in batches of 8 frames, at 512 bits a second, later 1,200 and 2,400.
Why it mattered. The same code, sync word and error correction are still used today.
1985
mid-1980s
Alphanumeric pagers could show letters as well as numbers, so a pager could carry a short text message typed by an operator.
Why it mattered. Pagers became the first mass-market way to receive text on the move.
1990 – 2000
Tens of millions of pagers worldwide, faster codes, two-way paging, and India's short, fast boom.
1992
July 1992
India's DoT invited bids for private paging services in 27 cities, with up to four operators in the largest. Disputes and clarifications delayed the launch by about three years.
Why it mattered. It was one of India's first steps in opening telecoms to private companies.
1994
By 1994 about 61 million pagers were reported to be in use around the world, up from about 3.2 million in 1980.
Why it mattered. Paging had become the world's mobile messaging system, before SMS.
1995
March 1995
India's first licensed paging service started in 1995, and circle licences for the rest of the country followed. Motorola was reported to supply about 80% of the pagers.
Why it mattered. For a few years, a pager was India's most affordable mobile connection.
1995
31 July 1995
West Bengal's chief minister made India's first mobile phone call. Early tariffs were about ₹16.80 a minute at peak, and incoming calls were charged too.
Why it mattered. Mobiles were pagers' future rivals, but at first they were far too costly for most.
1996
May 1996
Barely a year after launch, India had about 200,000 pager subscribers. More than 95% of pagers sold were alphanumeric, against under 20% in richer markets, and most users were individuals rather than companies.
Why it mattered. It showed how badly Indians needed a way to be reached when landlines took months to install.
1998
March 1998
Subscribers in India's 27 licensed cities reached about 8.3 lakh, and fell to about 6.7 lakh a year later. Some later accounts put the peak nearer 20 lakh. A tribunal later dated the industry's decline from 1997–98.
Why it mattered. The boom was already turning as mobile phones got cheaper.
By the numbers
India's pager boom rose fast after 1995 and was already falling by 1999, as reported at the time.
2001 – today
SMS and cheap mobiles replace pagers for most people, but hospitals and emergency crews keep them.
2002
By 2002 India had only about 5 lakh pager users. Mobiles that could send SMS for far less had become the everyday choice, and pagers lost their status appeal.
Why it mattered. Mobile phones did everything a pager did, and could talk back.
2003
2003–2008
US paging revenue fell from about $6.2 billion in 2003 to about $2.1 billion in 2008 as mobile phones took over.
Why it mattered. Consumers left, but hospitals and emergency services stayed.
2017
A national survey of US hospital doctors and other clinicians found that about 80% were given a pager by their hospital, and pagers were the most common way they received patient messages.
Why it mattered. Reliable coverage indoors keeps pagers in hospitals.
2019
February 2019
England's NHS was reported to use about 130,000 pagers, around one in ten of those left in the world, at about £6.6 million a year. Hospitals were told to phase them out by the end of 2021, keeping some for emergencies such as a Wi-Fi failure.
Why it mattered. Even the bleep's birthplace began switching to phone apps.
Did you know?
Every POCSAG pager still hunts for the same 32-bit sync word, 7CD215D8 in hexadecimal, agreed in 1981.
British doctors still call a pager a 'bleep', after the first hospital system at St Thomas' in 1956.
In 1996 more than 95% of India's pagers were alphanumeric, compared with under 20% in richer markets.
In 2019 England's NHS was reported to use about 130,000 pagers, around one in ten of those left in the world.
Japan's paging ran for 51 years, from NTT's start in 1968 to Tokyo Telemessage's close in 2019.
The people
1918 – 2000 · Radio engineer and inventor · Canada and United States
Built early walkie-talkies and the first telephone pager, and won a Lemelson-MIT lifetime award in 2000.
1873 – 1959 · Engineer and founder of Multitone · Russian Empire and England
Made hearing aids and the induction loop; his company built the first hospital radio 'bleep'.
1928 – 2009 · Engineer and Motorola president · United States
Led the team that made a transistorised pager, and later backed the first handheld mobile phone.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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