Charlotte (North Carolina) News, December 3, 1919, page 14:
THE POCKET TELEPHONE.
If you hear something buzzing in your upper left hand vest pocket you need pay no attention to it. It will not be a syncopation of the heart but merely your pocket telephone trying to attract your attention.
Some genius has gone and invented the blamed thing just to show that geniuses like to meddle in other people's affairs.
There are quite a number of people here and there who like to get away from their office telephones occasionally and have a few minutes to themselves, but science, that meddlesome old dame, is their Nemesis. When the wireless telephone in the vest pocket buzzes or rings or squawks or does whatever it does, you will have to answer. You cannot send your stenographer to say you are in conference, or, that you have gone to lunch and to please leave the number. When you go to lunch your telephone will go with you, whether you go to lunch or not.
When you leave home in the morning and try to leave your telephone on the bureau along with your tooth paste and your hairbrush, the wife will say: "George, don't forget your phone. I will want to call you several times today." If she is wise, and she probably will be, she will fasten your telephone around your neck with a padlock. You may tell her you would rather wear it next your heart in your vest pocket for sentiments sake, but that excuse will not go.
They say George Washington couldn't tell a lie. If he had had an office telephone he would have learned how. The old boys had a snap. That was before the days of the insidious alibi which is always a boomerang.