The cell phone gets its name from the system used to make calls. A broadcast tower covers a cell with a few mile radius that transmits calls and when many towers are combined a larger cell is created. When a person using a cell phone travels through these cells, the call is transferred from one cell to another, allowing us to talk on the go. Cell phones are now a modern necessity, but the development of the cell phone took a long time, evolving from clunky luxuries that barely worked to elegant and reliable tools. The history of cell phones is one of rapid change that led to the development of one of the most widely used devices today.
The idea of a phone you could take with you and use anywhere originated in the late 1940s, but it would be nearly 20 years before the FCC was cooperative enough to make usable prototypes. When the FCC finally allowed enough frequencies to develop a cell phone system, the idea took off and companies like AT&T began developing prototype phones and a wireless network.
In 1973, Motorola introduced the first portable cell phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which wouldn’t be commercially available until 1983. It was a far cry from today’s fancy phones, measuring over 12 inches long and weighing nearly two pounds. The first cell phone also cost much more than today’s phones at $3,995. The battery powered it for just an hour of talk time and it stored just 30 numbers.
Luckily, the cell phone industry had nowhere to go but from the first prototypes and although little by little the cell phone began to evolve. It took until the early 1990s for cell phones to look like the ones we have today. Cell phones began to shed pounds and inches and in 1993 BellSouth and IBM launched the Simon Personal Communicator. It was the first phone with additional functions and had a calculator, pager, fax machine, address book and email device, in addition to being a telephone. It weighed in at 20 ounces, a vast improvement over the two-pound behemoths that were its predecessors. The cost had also come down, although the Simon was still a whopping $900.
In the late 1990s, cell phones began to resemble those developed today, as they became smaller, lighter, and more feature-rich. Many people now take the ability to communicate on the go for granted, but it wasn’t long ago that mobile phones were such a luxury. The history of the cell phone shows a device that went from barely feasible to widely used in just a few short years.
