When were mobile phones first invented?
Mobile phones, particularly the smartphones that have become our inseparable companions today, are relatively new.
However, the history of mobile phones goes back to 1908 when a US Patent was issued in Kentucky for a wireless telephone.
Mobile phones were invented as early as the 1940s when engineers working at AT&T developed cells for mobile phone base stations.
The very first mobile phoneswere not really mobile phones at all. They were two-way radios that allowed people like taxi drivers and the emergency services to communicate.
Instead of relying on base stations with separate cells (and the signal being passed from one cell to another), the first mobile phone networks involved one very powerful base station covering a much wider area.
Motorola, on 3 April 1973 were first company to mass produce the the first handheld mobile phone.
These early mobile phones are often referred to as 0G mobile phones, or Zero Generationmobile phones. Most phones today rely on 3G or 4G mobile technology.
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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.
Handsets that could be used in a vehicle had been developed prior to Martin Cooper’s phone, but his was the first usable truly portable mobile telephone.
Cooper made mobile phone history in April 1973 when he made the first ever call on a handheld mobile phone.
Landmarks in early mobile phone history
- Japan became the first country to have a city-wide commercial cellular mobile phone network in 1979.
- The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system launched in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland in 1981.
- The next major step in mobile phone history was in the mid-eighties with the First Generation (1G) fully automatic cellular networks were introduced.
- The first ever mobile phone to be approved by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in the USA was the Motorola DynaTac in 1983.
Modern mobiles
Mobile telephony developed in leaps and bounds over the next decade, particularly with the arrival of handover technology.
This allowed users to keep their connections as they travelled between base stations – so as a user walked from one mobile phone mast to another, the connection and conversation would not drop or be interrupted.
The birth of the Second Generation (2G) mobile phones was in Finland in 1993. It was also the year that the first SMS text messages were sent and that data services began to appear on mobile phones.
Mobiles that we use today are 3G mobiles, or Third Generation mobiles, or even more advanced 4G handsets.
3G launched in 2001 and allowed operators to offer a huge range of advanced services such as video calling and HSPAdata transmission.
4G became commerically available in the UK in late 2012 and offers super fast connections and similarly speedy downloads.
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