Who invented Cell Phone/Mobile Phone?

Martine Cooper, 1973

On 3 April 1973, Martin Cooper, employed by electronic firm Motorola, made a call while walking in a New York street. He was using a prototype of the mobile or ‘cellular’ phone, which cooper, as much as anyone, could claim to have invented. The telephone was the size of a brick and weighed a kilogram, far short of today’s mobiles that weigh 100 grams or less and able to slip into a pocket.

History of Cell Phone:

Person to person communication using individual networks of mobile radios had been used for decades by emergency services like police and ambulances, taxis and long distance truck drivers. Motorola supplied much of the equipment. Mobile phones would be different, connecting through the existing telephone system, which then linked callers by wire. Everyday phones were hardwired, ‘landlines’ in today’s terminology. The emphasis would move away from the place and onto the person. Before the mobile phone arrived we would see the now barely remembered portable pager, able to receive a small message by radio (such as ‘ring your office’) but not send one. In time, the mobile phone would let the pager talk back.

Cooper’s phone was experimental; a decade passed before mobile phones went on sale. The weight was down to half a kilogram but the cost was $ 3500. Uptake was understandably slow. The UA did not have one million mobile phone subscribers until 1990, though by then growth was becoming exponential as costs fell. The early networks were creaking under the load. Today mobiles number in the billions globally, with more mobiles than landlines now connected.

Unfortunately, the government regulator, the Federal communication Commission (FCC), allocated so few channels to the initiative that hardly anyone thought it had a future, there was little incentive for research and progress was slow. Not until 1968 did the FCC reconsider its position; if the technology could be proven, more frequencies would be allocated. The chase was now on, with AT & T and Motorola in the lead. By the late 1970s trials of the new technology were running in cities like Chicago, with a few thousand handsets. A decade later the mobile was fast becoming mainstream.

Benefits of Cell Phones:

Since then, demand has joined with technological progress to make the mobile phone one of the most convenient and widely used inventions ever. Handsets have dwindles in size and weight due to more powerful computer chips and smaller batteries. More phones permitted smaller cells and reduced the required power to transmit message. ‘Analog’ operation, like the old landline phones with the electric current varying in synchrony with the speech sounds, was replaced by digital, with the sounds transmitted in binary code, resulting much better reception. Successive generations of technology (many networks today use the ‘third generation’ or 3G) have used higher operating frequencies, carrying much more information. 3G phones can handle moving images as well as high quality speech. 4G phones do ever better. It has been a remarkable 20 years.

The other trend is ‘convergence’, with one device performing functions that previously needed separate machines. Most new phones include a digital camera and/or an FM radio. Many are almost pocket computers, storing data, sending and receiving emails, playing video games, accessing the Internet. They are already absorbing the MP3 Player function, and soon will include a GPS device so users will always know where they are.

Yet the cost of buying them remains low and stable, even as functions are added. Phone networks even give them away. The capital costs reflect better technology and rising demand, with economies of scale. Most importantly mobile phones provide convenient access to data networks like the phone system and the internet. That is where real value lies for the user, and how the supplier secures their profit.

Commentators may argue about the balance of impacts of the ‘anywhere, anytime’ capacity for communication that mobile phones bring. But that impact has been profound, perhaps greater than from any invention since the personal freedom of movement provided by the automobile.