There once was a time when cell phones were rare and reserved mostly for professionals who could afford one. Today, it’s hard to imagine a world without them. Even if you don’t own one yourself, you probably see dozens of people talking on a cell phone every day. The rate at which we adopted the devices is astounding. But who invented them?
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. And then in 1900, on December 23 an inventor named Reginald Fessenden made the first wireless telephone call. He was the first to transmit the human voice via radio waves, sending a signal from one radio tower to another.
In 1947, an engineer named William Rae Young proposed that radio towers arranged in a hexagonal pattern could support a telephone network. Young’s design allowed for low-power transmitters[ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”show” ihc_mb_who=”2,3,5″ ihc_mb_template=”1″ ] to carry calls across the network.
Later, companies like AT&T offered some customers the chance to use radio telephones. These devices were primitive compared to today’s cell phones and resembled walkie-talkie transceivers. Only a few calls as few as three could be made on the system at a time.
By the 1960s, Bell Labs engineers Richard H. Frenkiel and Joel S. Engel developed the technology that could support Young’s design of a cellular network. But as AT&T sought permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to develop a cellular network, a competitor made a bold and cheeky move in 1973.
That competitor was Martin Cooper, who at the time was an executive with Motorola. Cooper led a team that designed the first practical cell phone. It was called the Motorola DynaTAC, and it still wasn’t a tiny device — it was nine inches long and weighed 1.1 kilograms. Cooper decided to make one of the first cellular telephone calls to professional rival Joel Engel at Bell Labs. That’s right — the first cell phone was involved in what some might refer to as a prank call!
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