When Jamie Talbot's in-laws were in town recently and the family had trouble getting a taxi to take them to dinner, the software engineer pulled out his phone and summoned a town car.

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We did our radio show from our farmhouse and my brothers and sisters would do the chores, milk the cows, come in and have breakfast and then my dad would crank the phone on the wall to let the engineer in Springfield, Missouri know that we were ready to do the show.

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The theory, which goes back to efforts by Danish engineer A.K. Erlang to predict phone traffic in 1909, gets pretty abstruse.

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The former Motorola engineer Marty Cooper, in fact, made the first-ever wireless phone call in 1973.

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But a Google engineer noted most people who find lost phones don't know what the phone's owner looks like.

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Merloni can connect machines to a service centre via a phone line, making possible off-site billing, testing and the dispatch of an engineer who knows what needs fixing in advance.

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Imagine in the future, your phone not only receiving a firmware update for its software, but also its circuits, because an electrical engineer figured out a more efficient way let a component perform its task!

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