Pioneers of Mobile Telephony
By 1930, telephone customers in the United States could be connected by radio to a passenger on an ocean liner in the Atlantic Ocean. The service was expensive, costing $7 per minute, equivalent to about $92.50/minute in 2011 dollars.
The first mobile telephone call was placed in St. Louis, Missouri on June 17, 1946 from a telephone set installed in an automobile. This first mobile telephone call was the end result of more than 10 years of work by Bell Labs scientists Alton Dickieson, D. Mitchell and H.I. Romnes.
Motorola and Bell Labs raced to be the first to produce a handheld mobile phone. That race ended on April 3, 1973 when Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs. The prototype handheld phone used by Dr. Martin Cooper weighed 2.5 pounds and measured 9 inches long, 5 inches deep and 1.75 inches wide. The prototype offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge.
John F. Mitchell, Motorola's chief of portable communication products and Martin Cooper's boss in 1973, played a key role in advancing the development of handheld mobile telephone equipment. Mitchell successfully pushed Motorola to develop wireless communication products that would be small enough to use anywhere and participated in the design of the cellular phone.
Read more about this topic: History Of Mobile Phones
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