Carterfone
Device to connects a two-way radio to the telephone system
The Carterfone is a device invented by Thomas Carter. It connects a two-way radio system to the telephone system, allowing someone on the radio to talk to someone on the phone. This makes it a direct predecessor to today's autopatch. The connection is acoustic -- sound travels through the air between the Carterfone and a conventional telephone that is part of the telephone system.
The reason the Carterfone connected the telephone and radio acoustically, instead of electrically, is that telephone network owners were legally allowed to and did bar devices they did not own from being connected electrically to their networks.
The Carterfone decision (13 F.C.C.2d 420) was a landmark United States regulatory decision that opened the public switched telephone network (PSTN) in America to customer-premises equipment (CPE). Twelve years earlier in 1956, a court had ruled in the Hush-A-Phone case that devices could mechanically connect to the telephone system (such as a rubber cup attached to a phone-company-owned telephone) without the permission of AT&T. In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) extended this privilege by allowing the Carterfone and other devices to be connected electrically to the AT&T network, as long as they did not cause harm to the system.
Description
The device is acoustically, but not electrically, connected to the public switched telephone network. It was electrically connected to the base station of the mobile radio system, and got its power from the base station. All electrical parts were encased in bakelite, an early plastic.
The public source identifies “Carterfone” as device to connects a two-way radio to the telephone system. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Carterfone, Device and connects.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2940562. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1956 and 1968.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Carterfone” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.