Stuart Corner
Friday, 16 May 2008 11:06
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Not exactly, but 100 years ago this week American inventor Nathan Stubblefield filed what is believed to be the first patent for a wireless telephone. A decade earlier an English scientist had clearly envisaged the possibility of global wireless communications using portable devices.
"I Nathan Stubblefield...have invented a new and useful wireless telephone, of which the following is a specification," reads the opening of his patent. "The present invention relates to means of electrically transmitting signals from one point to another without the use of connecting wires and more particularly comprehending means for securing telephonic communications between moving vehicles and way stations."
It has also been claimed that Stubblefield invented the radio before either Nikola Tesla or Guglielmo Marconi, but, according to his entry in Wikipedia, his devices seem to have worked by audio frequency induction (the electrical signal is an exact replica of the audio signal) rather than by radio frequency radiation for radio transmission telecommunications. (where the audio signal is superimposed, modulated, onto a higher frequency radio signal).
Stubblefield's name might not be as prominent in the annals of radio as Marconi or Tesla, but he does have
his own website , dedicated to promote a biography It says that he was born in Murray Kentucky in 1860, orphaned at age 14 and married at age 21 and "started life as a farmer but soon turns his attention to tinkering with inventions."
Apparently he enjoyed modest success selling and installing telephone systems in Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Mississippi and elsewhere: until a group of his customers in Murray bought a Bell Telephone franchise and competition puts Nathan out of business.
After that, Nathan's life went downhill, according to his biographer. He "experiences a series of devastating events. His financial backers sue him; his children sell the family farm; and his wife abandons him. He becomes an eccentric hermit, moving about from shack to shack and subsisting on donations from charitable relatives and neighbours. He dies in 1928 of starvation."
Then, a few months a publicity campaign was launched to establish a shrine and to recognize Murray, Kentucky as the 'Birthplace of Radio'. The giant US radio manufacturer, RCA, considered contributing to the effort, but rejected the idea on the advice of a corporate historian who said that Stubblefield's inventions had nothing to do with radio.
The modern era of cellular communications dates back to the 1973 when Motorola engineer Marty Cooper famously made the first call from a hand-held cellular phone. Less well known is the fact that the pioneering work by Cooper and his colleagues lead to cellular being adopted for mobile telephony instead of an inferior technology which the dominant telco, AT&T, was determined to foist upon the market. CONTINUED
