Those who were born after the mid-1980’s cannot remember a time without cell phones, laptops and DVDs. Those with a few more years of experience under their belts remember pay telephones and the earliest mobile phones, those inglorious bag and box types that spent most of their time hooked into a vehicle’s cigarette lighter.
While it now seems that all of this technology started in the 1980’s, the history of mobile technology actually started far earlier.
The father of mobile phones may well be Lars Ericsson who installed a phone in his car in 1910. When Ericsson wanted to make a call, he pulled into a town where phone lines were within reach, and used a couple of extra long electrical wires to connect to whichever telephone network were on the poles.
Radio telephony first surfaced in Europe as early as 1926 when luxury trains running from Hamburg to Berlin offered this service to customers. World War II saw the large scale use of this technology in the German Army’s fleet of tanks.
Flash forward to the 1950’s and the beginning of radio telephony mobile phones that could actually used by real people, instead of trained operators, and featured the ability to directly dial. In 1954’s blockbuster movie, Sabrina, Humphrey Bogart’s character calls from a telephone in the back of a limousine.
Prince Philip gets credit for the first personal mobile phone in the United Kingdom, having a system built in the trunk of his 1957 Aston Martin.
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The Ericsson Company debuted the first commercial automatic mobile telephone system in Sweden in 1956. While the network did not need human interaction at its base stations, the term mobile was a bit misleading as the first phones weighed 40 kg (90 lbs).
The second generation of this mobile technology was an upgrade in 1965 that used transistors and cut the handset weight in half. In 1973, the first truly mobile phone conversation took place in New York City involving researchers from Bell Labs speaking on Motorola’s first prototype phone.
What is now referred to as second generation mobile telephone systems debuted in the 1990’s with one of the first networks located in Finland. Second generation systems used digital circuits and rapidly increased the signals between the networks and phones.
Europe’s 2G systems featured higher frequencies than those in the U.S. The actual size of handsets began to slowly decrease, a feature that truly helped to make mobile technology attractive for personal use. Second generation phone technology also brought with it for the very first time, the capability to access other media content on phones, something that could not have even been imagined a scant 20 years before.
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