CELL PHONE HISTORY

Cell Phone History

Cell Phone History

Introduction

Over a billion people worldwide use cell phones. They've globally become extremely popular. That's no surprise, as they are simply amazing gadgets. With a cell phone, you can talk to anyone on the planet from just about anywhere! Cell phones now provide a huge number of functions, and new ones are constantly being added. Depending on the cell-phone model, you can: Store contact information, Make to-do lists, keep track of appointments and meetings, take and send digital pictures, send or receive e-mail, Get news and entertainment information from the Internet, play games, and even watch TV broadcasts. Other devices such as PDAs and MP3 players are now being built into some phones. So many features and so much technology built into a small device. They are one of the most complex electronics on the market today. I'm sure a lot of already know a lot can be done with the cell phone and that they have a lot to offer, but have you ever wondered how a cell phone works? How the cell phone came to be? Who invented it?

Discussion

The history of the cell phone can be traced back to Martin Cooper. He is known by many as the father of the cellular phone. He was hired by Motorola to lead their cellular research.

During the sixties and early seventies, many companies (mainly Motorola and AT&T's Bell Laboratories) were in a race to incorporate cellular technology into portable devices. Motorola, led by Martin Cooper, was the first company to make use of cellular technology (Kavoori pp. 33-70).

By 1973, they had set up a base cell station in New York and had completed the first working prototype of a cellular telephone, the Motorola Dyna-Tac.

On April 3, 1973, at a public demonstration, Martin Cooper became the first person to make a mobile call, using a brick-like 2 pound phone. Motorola introduced the much lighter 16-ounce "DynaTAC" phone into commercial service in 1983, with each phone costing $3,500.

That high initial price, plus the fact that cell phone plans where so expensive back then meant the average individual couldn't afford them.

It took seven more years before there were finally a million cell phone subscribers in the United States.

Today, there are more cellular subscribers than wire line phone subscribers in the world, with cell phones weighing as little as 3 ounces now (Katz pp.23-30).

The technology behind cell phones is fascinating. What most people don't realize is that cell phones are more radios than they are telephones(cellphones.org). Their primary function is to pick up signals from towers. Every cell phone is part of a cellular system, which is basically a division of a city or location into lots of smaller cells. Each of these cells have a base station that consist of a tower and a small building with radio equipment that allows the reuse of frequencies across a city, enabling millions of people use of their cell phones at the same ...