Cell phone time traveler: did they really think this through?

George Clarke from Belfast claims to have found a time traveler in the extras of a Charlie Chaplin DVD. In a shot of the premier of Circus, one of Chaplin's movies, a woman is seen walking by holding something to the side of her head. Clarke claims it is a cell phone, half a century before their invention, and suggests time travel as an explanation. I don't think Mr. Clarke has really thought this through.

The video can be seen here. I admit that the first time I saw it, the way the old woman was holding her hand to the side of her face looked remarkably like what we see all the time today with cell phones. At first Mr. Clarke seems genuinely befuddled. He can't come up with any reasonable explanation and is searching for something other than a cell phone. However, by the end his uncertainty is gone. He emphatically states that it is a cell phone.

To me, a closer look clearly shows it is not. I have no idea what she is holding. But whatever it is, she is clutching it and pressing it to her face. The item is enclosed in a fist. Her knuckles wrap around the object, and are spread out. The problem becomes apparent as Mr. Clarke tries to show how it is obviously a cell phone. He holds a cell phone to his face like the woman is holding the phone. Even his demonstration is obviously awkward. The problem is that we hold phones with the ends of our fingers. We do not wrap our knuckles around them. In his demonstration, he puts his knuckles around his phone and tries to make it seem normal, but it is not. And even his demonstration is not how the woman is holding the object. He holds his fingers together, wrapped around the phone. Her fingers are spread out, as if the object is larger than her hand. I tried to hold my cell phone with my fingers clutching it like the woman did, and I cannot do it. I use that grip on items about five times larger than my cell phone. Try it yourself.

Clarke also claims she is talking. You can briefly see her lips move (for probably a tenth of a second), but it not at all clear she is talking. Certainly it doesn't look like a conversation. If I were to venture a guess, I would say that she is holding something to her face for a toothache or something similar. In the past, dental care was much less wide spread, and chronic toothaches were common.

Clarke also has some strange idea that the old woman is actually a man in drag. He even refers to her as a him at one point. I won't even discuss this idea. It is just odd, and pointless.

However, I am not really interested in the details of what she is holding. I don't know, and we can't tell from old grainy footage. What I find interesting about Clarke's theory is how completely ridiculous it is, even granting the idea of time travel. Coming up with a theory of time travel based on two seconds of old footage is going well beyond the evidence to say the least. But let's grant the theory, just to see where it goes. I have to assume that Clarke never bothered to think beyond that.

The first obvious question is who the hell is she talking to? If she is having a conversation on her cell phone, that means there was someone else with a cell phone in 1920 as well. And if they were talking, that means there was a transmission tower sending their signals to each other. If they were more than a few miles apart, there were satellites transmitting. If they were able to dial each other, then the entire infrastructure of telephone number switching was in place. Did the time travelers really go back with all that is required to make a cell phone work? Time travel could bring a cell phone back to 1920, but it could not bring an operational cell phone.

I suppose there would be two possible replies to this. One is that they were not communicating through a cell tower but directly. This changes the claim. Then the claim is that they are talking through walkie talkies, not through cell phones. Then it is only a few decades ahead of it's time, rather than over half a century. There is no sign that she is pressing the transmit and receive buttons of a walkie talkie. The other possibility is that she it talking through time to the present. Since time travel doesn't actually happen, we can't say anything about what can and cannot happen, but it does seem absurd that cell phones signals or radio waves travel through time. Again, if this is the case she doesn't have a cell phone, she has some futuristic tricorder or something.

Even if we grant that some old woman and someone else travelled back in time with a walkie talkie to see a Chaplin movie, the story still doesn't hold up. If you travel back in time you will want to be disguised. You would need to look and dress like people of that time. The woman in the footage has done an excellent job of disguising herself. She blends in perfectly with the locals in dress and manner. Fortunately, she left her futuristic shiny Jetson's costume in the future. She then proceeded to pull out her cell phone and talk into it in the middle of a crowded street. Don't you think that would blow her cover just a little? No one in the film seems at all surprised that a woman is walking down the street talking into some block on her face. Doesn't this suggest that she was not actually doing anything surprising?

The time traveling cell phone lady is representative of a lot of pseudoscience. Find something that seems anomalous or out of place, and come to an elaborate conclusion. This is really the same thing as what Van Daniken does in Chariot's of the Gods?. Van Daniken searches artwork of ancient civilizations for things that resemble modern inventions--space ships, light bulbs, astronaut helmets, etc. He then uses these vague resemblances as evidence that alien astronauts visited our ancestors and provided them with inventions. And Van Daniken also never bothers to ask where the electricity came from to operate those light bulbs.