1. Nowadays we would be completely lost without our smartphones. Quite literally, as many of us rely upon the GPS services! And then there's everything else we're constantly checking; text messages, emails, social media, finding out what we'll look like in the future with a face doctoring app, finding out the best gambling sites with Online Casino Bluebook and a million other apps and websites to pass the time. But you may be surprised at the history of the humble mobile phone and just how far its origins can be dated back. The story of the mobile phone does not begin 20 years ago with your first chunky B&W cellphone, or even 40 years back with those boxy car phone precursors, but over 110 years ago!
Like many things that have become reality, fiction anticipated the development of mobile telephones. In 1906, the English caricaturist Lewis Baumer published a cartoon in Punch magazine entitled "Forecasts for 1907" in which he showed a man and a woman in London's Hyde Park each separately engaged in gambling and dating on wireless telephony equipment.
2. Just two years later, in 1908, a Professor Albert Jahnke and the Oakland Transcontinental Aerial Telephone and Power Company attempted to make that into reality when they claimed to have developed a wireless telephone. The company was accused of fraud, although the charge was later dropped, but thanks to the allegation they did not proceed with production.
3. Beginning in 1918, the German railroad system tested wireless telephony on military trains between Berlin and Zossen. In 1924, public trials started with telephone connection on trains between Berlin and Hamburg, and then the following year the company Zugtelephonie AG was founded to supply train telephony equipment. In 1926, telephone service in trains of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the German mail service on the route between Hamburg and Berlin was approved and offered to first-class travelers. The same year, 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
4. Amazingly, mobile telephones for automobiles became available from some telephone companies in the 1940s. Early devices were bulky, consumed large amounts of power, and the network supported only a few simultaneous conversations, unlike modern cellular networks which allow automatic and pervasive use of mobile phones for voice and data communications.
5. In the United States, engineers from Bell Labs began work on improving these early car phones. They developed a system to allow mobile users to place and receive telephone calls from automobiles, leading to the inauguration of mobile service on June 17, 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.
6. In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones in vehicles. At this stage, the technology to implement these ideas did not exist, nor had the frequencies been allocated. It would be another two decades before Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs expanded the early proposals into a much more detailed system plan. It was Porter who first proposed that the cell towers use the now-familiar directional antennas to reduce interference and increase channel reuse. Porter also invented the dial-then-send method used by all cell phones to reduce wasted channel time. 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.
7. But outside of the USA, further technological advances were taking place. The first fully automated mobile phone system for vehicles was launched in Sweden in 1956. Named MTA (Mobiltelefonisystem A), it allowed calls to be made and received in the car using a rotary dial. The car phone could also be paged. Calls from the car were direct dial, whereas incoming calls required an operator to locate the nearest base station to the car. It was developed by Sture Laurén and other engineers at Televerket network operator. Ericsson provided the switchboard while Svenska Radioaktiebolaget (SRA) and Marconi provided the telephones and base station equipment. MTA phones consisted of vacuum tubes and relays, and weighed 40 kilograms (88 lb).
8. The 1960s would see significant steps toward the mobile phones we know and love today. In the USSR, Leonid Kupriyanovich, an engineer from Moscow, developed and presented a number of experimental pocket-sized communications devices. The weight of one model, presented in 1961, was only 70 g and could almost fit in your palm.Sadly, the device never made its way to the public.
9. Motorola was the first company to produce a handheld mobile phone that wasn't limited to use in a car or another vehicle. On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs, his rival.
The prototype handheld phone used by Dr. Cooper is pictured above. It weighed 1.1 kilograms (2.4 lb) and measured 23 by 13 by 4.5 centimeters (9.1 by 5.1 by 1.8 in). The prototype offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge!!!
10. Over the decades since Motorola released that first proper handheld phone, technology rapidly improved, and handsets became smaller and smaller until we reached the smartphones of the 21st Century. Every year mobile technology becomes more accessible and cheaper, and something that is a necessity for many people. From emails to entertainment, shopping to finding expert advice on how to get into gambling on mobile devices with Online Casino Bluebook, controlling the lights in your home, paying for purchases at the till, starting your car remotely and occasionally even making a phone call, we can do it all. The humble cell phone has taken over our lives. In fact, today there are approximately 2.3 billion smartphone users! With the world in the palm of your hand it really is no wonder why.
And just think, over 110 years ago a satirical artist predicted a scene of a couple not directly communicating as they're engrossed in their own portable devices, and today you can see that happening pretty much everywhere you go.
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