Celebrating a century of wireless telephony!

Stuart Corner
Friday, 16 May 2008 11:06

Opinion and Analysis

When he made that first call Cooper, rather cheekily, made it to Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Labs: technology arm of the US monopoly telco AT&T, then the world's largest company. Cooper let him know that Motorola had managed to build a hand-held phone. Engel has denied any recollection of that momentous event.

Bell Labs was working at the time on a mobile phone system that would have required a box in the boot of a car to operate. Cooper and Motorola believed that the future was person-to-person communications, not person to-place. And Engel has been quoted saying, "Give Marty Cooper credit for the foresight in recognising that the business was going towards handhelds and not the car. It was as much a marketing insight as it was a technological breakthrough."

That first 'hand-held' phone weighed almost a kilo and was the size of a brick. It took Motorola a decade to get it down to a 500 gramme commercial unit and launch a cellular telephone service. That first truly mobile phone was the Motorola DynaTac, 1985.

You can see it and dozens more in an enthralling visual history of two decades of handset evolutions in this video created by US cellphone retailer e2save.

It's all got some fascinating glimpses of what future phone might look like. But for far-sightedness it's hard to beat this chap. The year was 1897, Marconi had taken out his first wireless patent less than a year earlier and William Ayrton, a UK physics professor, in an lecture at the Imperial Institute in London told his listeners: "There is no doubt that the day will come, maybe when you and I are forgotten, when copper wires, gutta-percha coverings [the insulation for then state of the art communications links - submarine cables], and iron sheathings will be relegated to the Museum of Antiquities. Then, when a person wants to telegraph to a friend, he knows not where, he will call an electromagnetic voice, which will be heard loud by him who has the electromagnetic ear, but will be silent to everyone else. He will call 'Where are you?' and the reply will come, 'I am at the bottom of the coal-mine' or 'Crossing the Andes' or 'In the middle of the Pacific'; or perhaps no reply will come at all, and he may then conclude that his friend is dead.