History

The history of mobile phones charts improvements to communication devices which connect wirelessly to the public switched telephone network. The transmission of speech by radio has a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony. Before the devices that are now referred to as a mobile phone existed, there were some precursors. The development of mobile telephony began in 1918 with tests of wireless telephony on military trains between Berlin and Zossen.[1] In 1924, public trials started with telephone connection on trains between Berlin and Hamburg.[1] In 1925, the company Zugtelephonie A. G. was founded to supply train telephony equipment[1] and in 1926 telephone service in trains of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the German mail service on the route between Hamburg and Berlin was approved [1] and offered to 1st class travelers.[2] In 1926 the artist Karl Arnold created a visionary cartoon about the use of mobile phones in the street, in the picture „wireless telephony", published in the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus.[3] The portrayal of a utopia of mobile phone in literature dates back to the year 1931. It is found in Erich Kästner's children's book The 35th of May, or Conrad's Ride to the South Seas: “ A gentleman who rode along the sidewalk in front of them, suddenly stepped off the conveyor belt, pulled a phone from his coat pocket, spoke a number into it and shouted: "Gertrude, listen, I'll be an hour late for lunch because I want to go to the laboratory. Goodbye, sweetheart!" Then he put his pocket phone away again, stepped back on the conveyor belt, started reading a book... ” —Erich Kästner The Second World War made military use of radio telephony links. Hand-held radio transceivers have been available since the 1940s. Mobile telephones for automobiles became available from some telephone companies in the 1940s. Early devices were bulky and consumed high power and the network supported only a few simultaneous conversations. Modern cellular networks allow automatic and pervasive use of mobile phones for voice and data communications. In the United States, engineers from Bell Labs began work on a system to allow mobile users to place and receive telephone calls from automobiles, leading to the inauguration of mobile service on 17 June 1946 in St. Louis, Missouri. Shortly after, AT&T offered Mobile Telephone Service. A wide range of mostly incompatible mobile telephone services offered limited coverage area and only a few available channels in urban areas. The introduction of cellular technology, which allowed re-use of frequencies many times in small adjacent areas covered by relatively low powered transmitters, made widespread adoption of mobile telephones economically feasible. In the USSR, Leonid Kupriyanovich, engineer from Moscow, in 1957-1961 developed and presented a number of experimental models of handheld mobile phone. The weight of a latest model, presented in 1961, was only 70 g and it freely took place on a palm. However in the USSR the decision at first to develop the system of automobile "Altai" phone was made ("Nauka i zhizn" magazine, 8, 1957 and 10, 1958, "Technika-molodezhi" magazine, 2, 1959, "Za rulem" magazine, 12, 1957, "Yuny technik" magazine, 7, 1957, 2, 1958 and 9, 1996, "Orlovskaya pravda" newspaper, 12, 1961). In 1965, Bulgarian company "Radioelektronika" presented on Inforga-65 interrnational exhibition in Moscow the mobile automatic phone combined with a base station. Solutions of this phone based on the system, developed by Leonid Kupriyanovich. One base station, connected to one telephone wire line, could serve up to 15 customer. ("Nauka i zhizn" magazine, 8, 1965). The advances in mobile telephony can be traced in successive generations from the early "0G" services like MTS and its successor Improved Mobile Telephone Service, to first generation (1G) analog cellular network, second generation (2G) digital cellular networks, third generation (3G) broadband data services to the current state of the art, fourth generation (4G) native-IP networks. Motorola was the first company to produce a handheld mobile phone. On 3 April 1973 Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment in front of reporters, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.[4][5] The prototype handheld phone used by Dr. Martin Cooper weighed 1.1 kg and measured 23 cm long, 13 cm deep and 4.45 cm wide. The prototype offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge.[6] Cooper has stated his vision for the handheld device was inspired by Captain James T. Kirk using his Communicator on the television show Star Trek.[7] John F. Mitchell,[8][9][10] Motorola's chief of portable communication products and Martin Cooper's boss in 1973, played a key role in advancing the development of handheld mobile telephone equipment. Mitchell successfully pushed Motorola to develop wireless communication products that would be small enough to use anywhere and participated in the design of the cellular phone.