Who invented the cell phone
Bookmark with:
According to an Associated Press Article in the April 12th issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Cell Phone was invented by Dr. Martin Cooper who at that time was a vice-president at Motorola. The article states that he made the first cell-phone call in 1973 on a street corner in New York using a base station at the top of a tall building in that city. He called an acquaintance at AT&T who at that time was a rival and perhaps said something like "we've done it". Motorola introduced its cell phone in 1983 after five generations, 15 years, and $ 90 million, however the first commercial cell phone service was started by NTT in Japan on December 3, 1979.
This is by no means the whole story, however. Cooper himself states that "Bell Labs had invented this thing called cellular technology". What Martin Cooper apparently did was build a relatively small radio telephone which could be carried by a person. He did not develop the idea and the mechanism for automatically switching over when a phone went from one cell to another. The true inventor of the cell phone is the person or group who developed the concept of small cells and implemented the automatic switchover system, and this was Bell Labs. If the FCC had not limited the number of channels available for radio telephones to 23, Bell Labs would not have been under intense pressure to develop the cellular concept. Anyone (especially someone from Bell Labs) who has more information on this point can contact me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Finally the explosion of cellular technology which we now see around us today was caused by the Microprocessor, i.e. a computer on a small single chip. This was primarily pioneered by Intel although Motorola and AMD, ARM have played significant roles. Today cell phone usage outpaces land line usage with a recent study done by Strategy Analytics claiming that 1.1 Billion cell phones were sold in 2007. Putting Apples launch of its iPhone in perspective, they hope to sell a mere 10 million devices in their first year.
