Who was the first person to invent the cell phone?






Do you recall when cell phones were more scarce than they are today? At this point, it isn't easy to picture a world without them. Even if you don't have a cell phone of your own, you likely see dozens of people using them and talking on them every day. It's incredible how quickly we became used to using the new technologies. But who came up with them first?


We need to go back more than a hundred years if we are going to find the answer to that question. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was the first person to invent the telephone. On December 23, 1900, on the outskirts of Washington, District of Columbia, an inventor by the name of Reginald Fessenden accomplished a spectacular feat: He made the first wireless telephone call. He was the first person to send a signal from one radio tower to another to communicate the sound of a human voice via radio waves.


The work done by Fessenden laid the groundwork for not only the development of broadcast radio but also cellular telephones and computer networks. In 1947, an engineer named William Rae Young postulated that a telephone network might be supported by radio towers placed in a hexagonal layout. Young worked under another engineer at Bell Laboratories called D.H. Ring, who was in charge of a team at the time. At the time, Bell Laboratories was a subsidiary of AT&T.


Because of Young's design, low-power transmitters were able to transport calls throughout the network. It is also considered handoffs, which occur when a caller moves from the broadcast radius of one tower to that of another. However, even if the theory was valid, there wasn't enough technology to make it a reality. It is estimated that the subsequent development will occur after more than ten years.


Radio telephones were an option that might be made available to some clients of cellular service providers such as AT&T while the globe awaited further advancements in cellular technology. These walkie-talkie transceiver-like gadgets were archaic compared to the sophisticated cell phones available today. Users could place no more than a few calls at a time on the system, with the number occasionally dropping as low as three. Callers frequently needed to wait for the conclusion of another conversation before they could finish their calls, which meant that having private chats was nearly impossible. The phones were extremely pricey, and some weighed as much as 80 pounds (36.3 kilos)! This is not the kind of item that you can slip into your pocket and go around with.


By the 1960s, engineers Richard H. Frenkiel and Joel S. Engel at Bell Labs had developed the technology that could support Young's vision of a cellular network. Young is credited as being the inventor of the cellular network. A rival company, however, made a daring and cheeky move in 1973 that occurred at the same time that AT&T was trying to get approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create a cellular network.


This rival was Martin Cooper, who at the time worked as an executive for Motorola, another company that AT&T counts among its competitors. Cooper was the group leader that developed the first cell phone that could be used. It was known as the Motorola DynaTAC. Despite its name, it was not a very little piece of equipment; it was 9 inches (22.9 centimeters) in length and weighed 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilograms). Cooper decided to place one of the first calls using a cellular telephone to a professional adversary named Joel Engel, who worked at Bell Labs. That's right: the very first cell phone was used to make a call that some people could consider a practical joke.


To turn mobile phones into a marketable commodity and expand the availability of cellular networks while simultaneously reducing production costs, it will require many more years. However, following more than a century of study and development, it has become clear that the substantial investment was worthwhile.





Article source : https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/inventions/who-invented-the-cell-phone.htm

Image source : https://pixabay.com/id/photos/seluler-telepon-tua-retro-mobile-1093358/


Komentar