What caused much web buzz and all kinds of conspiracy theories and “Twilight Zone” explanations, the most common being the one about “time traveler” over the last few months is that George Clark of Yellow Fever Productions noticed a shot of a lady talking on something which appears to be a mobile phone in the unused footage for Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 movie “The Circus”.
However, the explanation for this truly puzzling footage is as mundane as expected – according to each and every sound historian, what appears like a mobile phone to the 21st century viewer is in fact a simple hearing trumpet, not uncommon on movie sets back in those days.
“The old-fashioned mechanical or resonating hearing aids were not necessarily long and rounded,short, compact rectangular forms were not unusual.”” said Philip Skroska, an archivist at the Bernard Becker Medical Library of Washington University in St. Louis.
At any rate, one just has to wonder how would a mobile phone or mobile accessories look if they had been invented back then? Wouldn’t a Weimar era mobile case look truly elegant?