People don't always need to talk to communicate. In 1921, the Detroit police department started alerting its officers simply by transmitting a signal that made a device "beep", which logically resulted in the new devices being dubbed "beepers".

But the first true pager would take nearly 40 years to be developed. In 1949, CB developer Al Gross patented the telephone pager. New York's Jewish Hospital started using Gross' pager system the following year. But the FCC didn't approve the system until 1958, and the first consumer paging systems didn't appear until the mid-1970s.

By the mid-1990s, text messages dictated to operators could be received, and in 1997, paging went two-way thanks to pagers with tiny keyboards and new two-way paging networks. In the late 1990s, pager companies such as Research-in-Motion (RIM) began introducing specialized e-mail pagers, small devices with keyboards that enabled users to send and receive e-mail. Pagers also got smaller; two companies, Seiko Communications and MTX – a partnership between Motorola Inc. and Timex Corp. – introduced watches that incorporated pagers.

But the business of text messaging soon would be passed to another, more expansive communications device: the cell phone.