History of mobile phones

The history of mobile phones begins with early efforts to develop mobile telephony concepts using two-way radios and continues through emergence of modern mobile phones and associated services.



Radiophones have a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony, through the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s, while hand-held mobile radio devices have been available since 1973. Mobile phone history is often divided into generations (first, second, third and so on) to mark significant step changes in capabilities as the technology improved over the years.

Pioneers of radio telephony

The early years of the 20th century saw the first attempts at wireless and mobile telephony. In 1908, U.S. Patent 887,357 for a wireless telephone was issued to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this patent to "cave radio" telephones and not directly to cellular telephony as the term is currently understood. Two years later Lars Magnus Ericsson installed a telephone in his car, although this was not a radio telephone. While travelling across the country, he would stop at a place where telephone lines were accessible and using a pair of long electric wires he could connect to the national telephone network.




In Europe, radio telephony was first used on the first-class passenger trains between Berlin and Hamburg in 1926. At the same time, radio telephony was introduced on passenger airplanes for air traffic security. Later radio telephony was introduced on a large scale in German tanks during the Second World War. After the war German police in the British zone of occupation first used disused tank telephony equipment to run the first radio patrol cars. In all of these cases the service was confined to specialists that were trained to use the equipment. In the early 1950s ships on the Rhine were among the first to use radio telephony with an untrained end customer as a user.



However it was the 1940s onwards that saw the seeds of technological development which would eventually produce the mobile phone that we know today. Motorola developed a backpacked two-way radio, the Walkie-Talkie and a large hand-held two-way radio for the US military. This battery powered "Handie-Talkie" (HT) was about the size of a man's forearm. In 1946 soviet engineers G. Shapiro and I. Zaharchenko successfully tested their version of a radio mobile phone mounted inside a car. The device could connect to local telephone network with a range of up to 20 kilometers.

In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones in vehicles. Philip T. Porter, also of Bell Labs, proposed that the cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centers and have directional antennas that would transmit/receive in three directions (see picture at right) into three adjacent hexagon cells. At this stage the technology to implement the ideas did not exist nor had the frequencies had been allocated and it would be some years until Richard H. Frenkiel and Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs developed the electronics to achieve this in the 1960s.




During the 1950s the experiments of the pioneers started to appear as usable services across society, both commercially and culturally. In the 1954 movie Sabrina, the businessman Linus Larrabee (played by Humphrey Bogart) makes a call from the phone in the back of his limousine. In 1957 a young Soviet radio engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich from Moscow created a portable mobile phone, and named it the LK-1 after himself. This mobile phone consisted of a relatively small handset equipped with an antenna and rotary dial, and communicated with a base station. The LK-1 weighed 3 kilograms and could operate in a range of up to 20 or 30 kilometers. The battery lasted 20 to 30 hours. The LK-1 was depicted in popular Soviet magazines as Nauka i zhizn. Kupriyanovich patented his mobile phone in the same year. The base station serving the LK-1 (called ATR, or Automated Telephone Radiostation) could connect to local telephone network and serve several customers. During 1958, Kupriyanovich produced a "pocket" version. The weight of improved lighter handset was about 500 grams.



In 1969, a patent for a wireless phone using an acoustic coupler for incoming calls was issued in US Patent Number 3,449,750 to George Sweigert of Euclid, Ohio on June 10, 1969, but did not include dialing a number for outgoing calls.



In all these early examples, a mobile phone had to stay within the cell area serviced by one base station throughout the phone call, ie there was no continuity of service as the phones moved through several cell areas. The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff, as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology, were described in the 1970s.