Why invented the cell phone

Want an Apple phone? We'll help you get the best iPhone for you. We use cookies and similar technologies. You can use the settings below to accept all cookies which we recommend to give you the best experience or to enable specific categories of cookies as explained below. Find out more by reading our Cookie Policy. Uswitch Mobiles All articles. History of mobile phones and the first mobile phone Last updated: 19 May In fact, mobile phones as we know them today have only been around in the last 20 years.

When were mobile phones invented? Latest mobile phone deals Landmarks in mobile history Mobile telephony has a long history that started off with experiments of communications from and to moving vehicle rather then handheld devices. It had a total of subscribers between Stockholm and Gothenburg. The price? It was also the first phone to be openly marketed as a luxury item.

The battery lasted for days and it was light and truly pocketable at only g. It also introduced the Snake game, customisable ringtones and a silent 'vibrate' mode. Capitalising on a wave of nostalgia, in Nokia announced the release of an all-new See our latest mobile phone deals The development of mobile phone technology The first mobile phone invented for practical use was by a Motorola employee called Martin Cooper who is widely considered to be a key player in the history of mobile phones.

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Category: Guides. You may also like. How to stop nuisance calls Make junk texts and nuisance calls a thing of the past. Samsung Galaxy S21 buyer's guide Check out our best deals. Which iPhone should I choose? Get the best model for you Want an Apple phone? Your cookie preferences We use cookies and similar technologies. Remember, there were not even any cordless phones at that time. We had a press conference [in ], and I handed the phone to this young lady journalist and told her to make a phone call.

And she said, "Can I call my mother in Australia? This woman was just spellbound, she couldn't imagine how this little phone could reach more than halfway around the world, and talk to her mother who actually answered the phone.

Sophisticated New Yorkers were standing there with their mouths open. The reception was quite extraordinary. The chairman of our company happened to be in Washington the time we did the next demonstration [in the early s]. He visited with the vice president He said, "Well, I have to show this to Ron.

And Reagan asks, "What's keeping us from having this? If you think about it, this is not a commercial product and if you had to build one it would cost about a million dollars. By the time we built a commercial product, it was 10 years later. Well, I wouldn't say it was large number of people; in fact it was a very small number. In the beginning it was wealthy people, but also people who had to be on the move.

It was for people like real estate agents and doctors, who were already more accustomed to technology because they were using pagers. Cell phones didn't really get to be a big deal til about another seven or eight years later. Everybody thinks that the cell phone has always been here and that it's always been popular, but it wasn't until -- before there were as few as a million cell phones in the world -- that's where it started to really explode.

Well, we knew that someday everybody would have a [cell] phone, but it was hard to imagine that that would happen in my lifetime. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in And then in , on December 23 on the outskirts of Washington, D. He was the first to transmit the human voice via radio waves, sending a signal from one radio tower to another.

Fessenden's work paved the way for broadcast radio but it also provided the foundation for cell phones and networks. In , an engineer named William Rae Young proposed that radio towers arranged in a hexagonal pattern could support a telephone network.

Young worked under another engineer named D. Young's design allowed for low-power transmitters to carry calls across the network. It also accounted for handoffs , which is when a caller moves from one tower's broadcast radius to another.

But though the theory was sound, the technology to make it happen was lacking. It would take more than 10 years for the next development. These devices were primitive compared to today's cell phones and resembled walkie-talkie transceivers. Only a few calls -- sometimes as few as three -- could be made on the system at a time. Callers would sometimes have to wait for another conversation to end before completing a call, which also meant that private conversations were practically impossible.

However, a couple of key engineering developments and a classic tale of American business rivalry would help lay the foundation for the device that revolutionized the way people communicate. Since the turn of the 20th century, people have envisioned a world where they would be able to have a means of communication with each other continuously, free from the restricting wires and cables.

For most of their history, "mobile" phones were mostly two-way radios that you installed on something that moved. In the s, German railroad operators began testing wireless telephones in their train cars, starting with military trains on a limited number of lines, before spreading to public trains a few years later. In , Zugtelephonie AG was founded as a supplier of mobile telephone equipment for use in trains, and the following year saw the first public introduction of wireless telephones for first-class passengers on major rail lines between Berlin and Hamburg.

The Second World War saw major advances in radio technology , with handheld radios coming into widespread use. These advances placed mobile radio systems in military vehicles around the same time, but technological limitations limited the quality of the systems significantly. This didn't stop companies from offering mobile telephone systems designed for use in automobiles in the s and s in America and elsewhere.

However, like their military counterparts, they came with serious drawbacks.