That Phone in Your Pocket

A key concept behind cell-phone technology is the notion that space can conduct electricity. Within twenty years of the initial hypothesis and research, successful experiments led to the first telegraph. This may not seem related to cell phones today, but it was a major breakthrough in long-distance communication.

It was another fifty years before the technology expanded beyond the telegraph. In the 1920s, police cars began installing mobile radios. The government created the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) in 1934. One of their first tasks was to assign certain channels to specific uses, such as emergency and government use.

A mobile radio telephone service was developed in the mid-1940s, but heavy interference caused it to be impractical. During this same time period, the first radio car phones were built. Again, heavy interference doomed the effort to failure. By the end of the 1940s, the FCC authorized several channels to be used as Radio Common Carriers, which made it possible for corporations and private organizations to use mobile phones. These were the first link between mobile phones and telephones, instead of operating radio to radio.

Car phones became true mobile phones separate from radios. The early units were large and bulky and required an operator to make the connection between users. The next major development made use of a single channel operating at a higher frequency, eliminating the need for operators.

As early as 1970, the FCC assigned specific frequencies for cell phones. Within a year, AT&T proposed the first mobile telephone system to the FCC, based on dividing cities into “cells.” Not long after, the first mobile handset was designed and demonstrated to the public. Early cell phones were bulky and expensive and not readily available to the public.

The rest, as they say, is history. The cell-phone industry has become an ever-growing empire, with the number of cell phones in use quickly approaching the number of people on the planet.