When was the First Mobile Phone Invented

Mobile phones have brought about a dramatic change to the communication industry. The development of mobile phones has made long-distance communication a matter of seconds. Who was the genius to invent the first mobile phone and when was it invented? The mobile phone was invented in 1973 by Dr. Martin Cooper, a Motorola employee. On April 3, 1973, the first cell phone call was made. The caller was naturally, Dr. Cooper himself. The receiver of the first mobile phone call was Joel Angel, the research head at AT&T’s Bell Labs and rival of Dr. Cooper.

History of Mobile Phones

Prior to the development of mobile phones, people used two-way radios to communicate while they were mobile. The idea behind two-way radios gave rise to the invention of mobile phones. During the 1940s, Motorola came up with the Walkie-Talkie followed by handheld two-way radios that operated on battery power.

In 1947, Douglas Ring and W. Rae Young at Bell Labs introduced the idea of hexagonal cells for mobile phones. Philip Porter at Bell Labs came up with the idea that the cell towers should be at the corners of the hexagonal cells and not at their centers. He also proposed that the cell towers should have directional antennas.

Ericsson came up with an automatic mobile phone system, which was released in Sweden in 1956. It was known as MTA and did not require manual control. The drawback of this system was that the phones weighed 40 kgs. The year 1965 witnessed the introduction of a revised mobile phone technology that was based on DTMF signaling and used lighter mobile phones. Till 1970, mobile phones had to remain within their cell area and there were no means to continue communication while switching between cell areas. The call handoff system that allows users to move through different cell areas came up only in 1970. It's invention is attributed to Amos E. Joel, Jr, a Bell Labs engineer. The ARP network in Finland, established in 1971, boasts of being the first successful commercial mobile phone network. You may like to know more about the evolution of mobile phone technology.