A hand-held mobile radiotelephone is an old dream of radio engineering. A particularly vivid and in many ways accurate prediction was presented by Arthur C. Clarke in a 1959 essay, where he envisioned a "personal transceiver, so small and compact that every man carries one." He wrote: "the time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth merely by dialing a number." Such a device would also, in Clarke's vision, include means for global positioning so that "no one need ever again be lost." Later, in Profiles of the Future, he predicted the advent of such a device taking place in the mid-1980s.