A pager (also known as a beeper) is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays numeric messages and/or receives and announces voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers can also acknowledge, reply to, and originate messages using an internal transmitter.[1] Pagers operate as part of a paging system which includes one or more fixed transmitters (or in the case of response pagers and two-way pagers, one or more base stations), as well as a number of pagers carried by mobile users. These systems can range from a restaurant system with a single low-power transmitter, to a nationwide system with thousands of high-power base stations.
One of the first practical paging services was launched in 1950 for physicians in the New York City area. Physicians paid $12 per month for the service and carried a 6 oz (200 g) pager that would receive phone messages within 25 mi (40 km) of a single transmitter tower. The system was manufactured by the Reevesound Company and operated by Telanswerphone.[2] In 1960, John Francis Mitchell combined elements of Motorola's walkie-talkie and automobile radio technologies to create the first transistorized pager,[3][4][5] and from that time, paging technology continued to advance, and pager adoption continued to expand, until the early 1990s. However, by the mid-1990s, as cellular technologies became cheaper and more widely available, advanced services began to displace paging as a commercial product. Today, pagers exist largely as niche products, finding preferential use in applications such as hospitals, public safety,[6] and retail[7] locations where their simplicity, high reliability, and low cost represent significant advantages.