History History of mobile phonesAnalog Motorola DynaTAC 8000X Advanced Mobile Phone System mobile phone as of 1983In 1908, U.S. Patent 887,357 for a wireless
telephone was issued in to Nathan B. Stubble field of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this patent to "cave radio" telephones and not
directly to cellular telephony as the term is currently understood.[4] Cells for mobile phone base stations were invented in 1947
by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T and further developed by Bell Labs during the 1960s. 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 cellular radio devices have been available
since 1973. A patent for the first wireless phone as we know today was issued in US Patent Number 3,449,750 to George Sweetbrier of
Euclid, Ohio on June 10, 1969.
In 1945, the zero generation (0G) of mobile telephones was introduced. Like other technologies of the time, it involved a
single, powerful base station covering a wide area, and each telephone would effectively monopolize a channel over that whole
area while in use. 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 1970's; see for example Fluhr and Nussbaum [5], Hachenburg et. al. [6],
and U.S. Patent 4,152,647, issued May 1, 1979 to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, both of Las Vegas, Nevada and
assigned by them to the United States Government.Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive is widely considered to be
the inventor of the first practical mobile phone for hand-held use in a non-vehicle setting. Cooper is the first inventor named
on "Radio telephone system" filed on October 17, 1973 with the US Patent Office and later issued as US Patent 3,906,166;[7] other
named contributors on the patented Cooper's boss, John F. Mitchell, Motorola's chief of portable communication products,
who successfully pushed Motorola to develop wireless communication products that would be small enough to use outside the home,
office or automobile and participated in the design of the cellular phone.[8][9] Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset,
Cooper made the first call on a hand-held mobile phone on April 3, 1973 to a rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.[10]
The first commercial citywide cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. Fully automatic cellular networks were
first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation). The Nordic Mobile Telephone
(NMT) system went online in Denmark,
Finland, Norway and Sweden in 1981.[11]
Personal Handy-phone System mobiles and modems used in Japan around 1997-2003In 1983, Motorola
DynaTAC was the first
approved mobile phone by FCC in the United States.In 1984, Bell Labs developed modern commercial cellular technology
(based, to a large extent, on the Gladden, Perelman Patent), which employed multiple, centrally controlled base stations
(cell sites), each providing service to a small area (a cell). The cell sites would be set up such that cells partially
overlapped. In a cellular system, a signal between a base station (cell site) and a terminal (phone) only need be strong
enough to reach between the two, so the same channel can be used simultaneously for separate conversations in different
cells.Cellular systems required several leaps of technology, including handover, which allowed a conversation to continue as
a mobile phone traveled from cell to cell. This system included variable transmission power in both the base stations and
the telephones (controlled by the base stations), which allowed range and cell size to vary. As the system expanded and
neared capacity, the ability to reduce transmission power allowed new cells to be added,resulting in more, smaller cells
and thus more capacity. The evidence of this growth can still be seen in the many older,tall cell site towers with no
antennae on the upper parts of their towers.These sites originally created large cells, and so had their antennae mounted
atop high towers; the towers were designed so that as the system expanded—and cell sizes shrank—the antennae could be
lowered on their original masts to reduce range.
A 1991
GSM mobile
phoneThe first "modern" network technology on digital 2G (second generation) cellular technology was
launched by
Radiolinja (now part of Elisa Group) in 1991 in Finland on the
GSM standard which also marked the introduction
of competition in mobile telecoms whe
n Radiolinja challenged incumbent
Telecom Finland (now part of
TeliaSonera) who ran a
1G
NMT network.The first data services appeared on mobile phones starting with person-to-person SMS text messaging in Finland
in 1993. First trial payments using a mobile phone to pay for a Coca Cola vending machine were set in Finland in 1998. The first
commercial payments were mobile parking trialled in Sweden but first commercially launched in Norway in 1999. The first
commercial payment system to mimic banks and credit cards was launched in the Philippines in 1999 simultaneously by mobile
operators Globe and Smart. The first content sold to mobile phones was the ringing tone, first launched in 1998 in Finland.
The first full internet service on mobile phones was i-Mode introduced by
NTT DoCoMo in Japan in 1999.In 2001 the first
commercial launch of 3G (Third Generation) was again in Japan by
NTT DoCoMo on the
WCDMA standard.[12]
Until the early 1990s, following introduction of the Motorola
MicroTAC, most mobile phones were too large to be carried in
a jacket pocket, so they were typically installed in vehicles as car phones. With the miniaturization of digital components
and the development of more sophisticated batteries, mobile phones have become smaller and lighter.
