"The History of Cell Phones - A Vision Realized.". "History in the Making." Hammond Museum of Radio. "Bell's Telephone." Resources for Science and Learning. "Martin Cooper - Inventor of the Cellphone." 2006. "1946: First Mobile Telephone Call." (Jan. "Inventor of cell phone: We knew someday everybody would have one." CNN. Learn more about how the technology around us came to be by following the links on the next page. But after more than a century of research and development, the considerable investment has paid off. It would take many more years to build out cellular networks and drive down production costs to make cell phones a viable commercial product. That's right - the first cell phone was involved in what some might refer to as a prank call!
Cooper decided to make one of the first cellular telephone calls to professional rival Joel Engel at Bell Labs. It was called the Motorola DynaTAC, and it still wasn't a tiny device - it was 9 inches (22.9 centimeters) long and weighed 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilograms). Cooper led a team that designed the first practical cell phone. That competitor was Martin Cooper, who at the time was an executive with Motorola, one of AT&T's competitors. But as AT&T sought permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to develop a cellular network, a competitor made a bold and cheeky move in 1973. Engel developed the technology that could support Young's design of a cellular network. The phones were expensive and some weighed up to 80 pounds (36.3 kilograms) - not the sort of device you can carry around in your pocket!īy the 1960s, Bell Labs engineers Richard H. Callers would sometimes have to wait for another conversation to end before completing a call, which also meant that private conversations were practically impossible. Only a few calls - sometimes as few as three - could be made on the system at a time.
These devices were primitive compared to today's cell phones and resembled walkie-talkie transceivers. While the world waited for further developments in cellular technology, companies like AT&T offered some customers the chance to use radio telephones. It would take more than 10 years for the next development. But though the theory was sound, the technology to make it happen was lacking. It also accounted for handoffs, which is when a caller moves from one tower's broadcast radius to another. Young's design allowed for low-power transmitters to carry calls across the network. Ring, who led a team at Bell Laboratories, which was part of AT&T at the time. Young worked under another engineer named D.H. In 1947, an engineer named William Rae Young proposed that radio towers arranged in a hexagonal pattern could support a telephone network. Fessenden's work paved the way for broadcast radio but it also provided the foundation for cell phones and networks.