As is so often the case, the answer to the apparently simple question “When Was The Cellphone Invented?” is, actually, not so simple.
It all comes down to definition. The terms “cellphone” and “mobile phone” are both used to describe a device that can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link while moving around a wide geographic area.
Although we think today of mobile communication devices being small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, this was not true of its forerunners.
Mobile telephone development actually began in Germany in 1918 with tests on military trains between Berlin and Zossen. In I924, public trials started with telephone connection on trains between Berlin and Hamburg.
In 1925, the company Zugtelephonie A.G. was founded to supply train telephony equipment. In 1926 telephone service in trains on the route between Hamburg and Berlin was approved and offered to 1st class travelers.
But it was The Second World War that deve loped the military use of radio telephony links. Hand-held radio transceivers were invented in the 1940s. In 1946 mobile telephones for automobiles became a reality with the first service in St. Louis, Missouri
In the USSR, Leonid Kupriyanovich, a Moscow engineer, developed and presented a number of experimental models of handheld mobile phones between 1957-1961. However the decision was made to prioritize development of the car-phone. In 1965, at an international exhibition in Moscow, a Bulgarian company showed a mobile automatic phone combined with a base station.
Despite all these innovative ideas over several decades in various countries, it is now widely accepted that the US company, Motorola, was the first to produce a workable hand-held mobile phone. On 3 April 1973 Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment in front of reporters.
He placed a call to a Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Laboratories. His prototype phone weighed 1.1 kg (2.4 Ibs) and measured 23 cm (9 inches) long. This phone gave a talk time of only 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge.
It is not widely known that the real force behind the development of the cellphone was John F. Mitchell, Motorola’s chief of portable communication products and Martin Cooper’s boss. It was Mitchell who successfully pushed Motorola to develop wireless communication products that would be small enough to use anywhere.
In 1983, Motorola launched the cellphone model DynaTAC 8000x. This was the first such device to be made commercially available.
Martin Cooper once stated his vision for the handheld device was inspired by Captain James T. Kirk using his Communicator on the television show Star Trek.
