The first portable telephone. Who invented the telephone

Where and when did the first cell phone appear in Russia? And what model was it?

1. the first cell phone was "BRICK" (from MikraTak or STARTAK), and that says it all!
2. On September 9, 1991, the first cellular operator based on NMT-450 technology, Delta Telecom CJSC, appeared in Russia. The price of the Mobira phone - MD 59 NB2 (weighing about 3 kg) with connection was about $4000. A minute of conversation cost about $1. In the first four years of operation, Delta Telecom connected 10,000 subscribers.

   Surely Mobira - MD 59 NB2 - is the first phone
   but something tells me that the government had them much earlier)

3. The very first mobile phone in the world was created by the Soviet engineer Kupriyanovich L.I. in 1957. The device was named LK-1.

   The weight of the portable mobile phone LK-1 was 3 kg. The battery charge was enough for 20-30 hours of operation, the range was 20-30 km. The solutions used in the phone were patented on November 1, 1957.

   By 1958, Kupriyanovich had reduced the weight of the device to 500. It was a box with toggle switches and a dial for dialing numbers. An ordinary telephone handset was connected to the box. There were two ways to hold the device during a call. Firstly, you could use two hands to hold the tube and box, which is not convenient. Or you could hang the box on your belt, then use only one hand to hold the tube.

   The question arises why Kupriyanovich used a handset and did not build speakers into the phone itself. The fact is that using the tube was considered more convenient because of its lightness; it is much easier to hold a plastic tube weighing a few grams than the entire apparatus. As Martin Cooper later admitted, using his very first mobile phone helped him build up his muscles quite well. According to Kupriyanovich’s calculations, if the device was put into mass production, its cost could be 300-400 rubles, which was approximately equal to the cost of a TV.

   In 1961, Kupriyanovich demonstrated a telephone weighing 70 grams, which fit in the palm of your hand and had a range of 80 km. It used semiconductors and a nickel-cadmium battery. There was also a smaller version of the dial dial. The disk was small and was not intended to be rotated with fingers; most likely, it was intended to be used with a pen or pencil. The plans of the creator of the very first cell phone in the world were to create a portable phone the size of a matchbox and a range of 200 km. It is quite possible that such a device was created, but was used only by special services.

4. http://otvet.mail.ru/question/6579802/ - that’s when he appeared...
   The price of the Nokia Mobira - MD 59 NB2 phone (weighing about 3 kg) with connection was about $4000. A minute of conversation cost about $1. In the first four years of operation, Delta Telecom connected 10,000 subscribers. The first NMT mobile phone - Nokia Mobira CitymanThe first GSM mobile phone - Nokia 1011
5. The first mobile system in the USSR was developed at the Voronezh Research Institute of Communications in the period from 1958-59. In 1963, the Altai system was put into trial operation in Moscow.

   Why Altai? It was understood that the masses did not need such a communication system, perhaps it would remain secret forever, so

   The first mobile communications appeared in Leningrad and there are many legends and mysteries surrounding its appearance. Nokia Mobira MD59-NB2 looks damn similar to Motorola Dyna Tac. The creator of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper, made his first call to Bell Laboratories to ask how they were doing and what new ideas they had in the field of communications. The first cellular call in our country was made by Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak, the first mayor of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Of course, he was interested in talking with the mayor of New York. The first call was from abroad. The developers of the communication system were confident in the result, but just in case, radiotelephone communication, including long-distance communication in the city, was turned off at the time of the call. Apparently the Finns scored their first goal not quite according to the rules. In the photo below, Martin Cooper smiles sarcastically and is ready to tell Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev how the Nokia Mobira MD59-NB2 differs from the Motorola Dyna Tac.

   Time is running. Nokia has become the leading manufacturer of original devices. Once, in a conversation with an American, I said: Motorola is a good phone, but we love Nokia. Yes, yes, said the American: The Japanese also make good electronics. Finns,” I corrected him, and we both laughed.

The history of the creation of the cell phone. The information was found on LiveJournal by masterok. There are interesting points - as always, Russia is ahead of everyone

Dr Martin Cooper with his first mobile phone model in 1973. Photo from 2007.

Usually the history of the creation of a mobile phone is told something like this.

On April 3, 1973, the head of Motorola's mobile communications division, Martin Cooper, was walking through the center of Manhattan and decided to make a call on his cell phone. The mobile phone was called Dyna-TAC and looked like a brick, weighed more than a kilogram, and had a talk time of only half an hour.

Prior to this, the son of the founder of Motorola, Robert Gelvin, who at that time held the post of executive director of this company, allocated $15 million and gave his subordinates a period of 10 years to create a device that the user could carry with him. The first working sample appeared just a couple of months later. The success of Martin Cooper, who joined the company in 1954 as an ordinary engineer, was facilitated by the fact that since 1967 he had been developing portable walkie-talkies. They led to the idea of ​​the mobile phone.

It is believed that until this moment there were no other mobile telephones that a person could carry with him, like a watch or a notebook. There were walkie-talkies, there were “mobile” phones that could be used in a car or train, but there was no such thing for just walking down the street.

Moreover, until the early 1960s, many companies generally refused to conduct research in the field of creating cellular communications, because they came to the conclusion that, in principle, it was impossible to create a compact cellular telephone device. And none of the specialists from these companies paid attention to the fact that on the other side of the Iron Curtain, photographs began to appear in popular science magazines depicting... a man talking on a mobile phone. (For those in doubt, the numbers of the magazines where the pictures were published will be given, so that everyone can be sure that this is not a graphics editor).

Hoax? Joke? Propaganda? An attempt to misinform Western electronics manufacturers (this industry, as is known, was of strategic military importance)? Maybe we are just talking about an ordinary walkie-talkie? However, further searches led to a completely unexpected conclusion - Martin Cooper was not the first person in history to call on a mobile phone. And not even second.

Engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich demonstrates the capabilities of a mobile phone. "Science and Life", 10, 1958.

The man in the photo from the Science and Life magazine was named Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich, and it was he who turned out to be the person who made the cell phone call 15 years before Cooper. But before we talk about this, let us remember that the basic principles of mobile communications have a very, very long history.

Actually, attempts to make the phone mobile appeared soon after its inception. Field telephones with coils were created to quickly lay a line, and attempts were made to quickly provide communication from a car by throwing wires onto a line running along the highway or connecting to a socket on a pole. Of all this, only field phones have found relatively wide distribution (at one of the mosaics of the Kievskaya metro station in Moscow, modern passengers sometimes mistake a field phone for a mobile phone and laptop).

It became possible to ensure true mobility of telephone communications only after the advent of radio communications in the VHF range. By the 1930s, transmitters had appeared that a person could easily carry on his back or hold in his hands - in particular, they were used by the American radio company NBC for operational reporting from the scene. However, such means of communication have not yet provided connections with automatic telephone exchanges.

Portable VHF transmitter. "Radiofront", 16, 1936

During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet scientist and inventor Georgy Ilyich Babat in besieged Leningrad proposed the so-called “monophone” - an automatic radiotelephone operating in the centimeter range 1000-2000 MHz (currently the GSM standard uses frequencies 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 Hz), number which is encoded in the phone itself, is equipped with an alphabetic keyboard and also has the functions of a voice recorder and an answering machine. “It weighs no more than a Leika film machine,” wrote G. Babat in his article “Monophone” in the Tekhnika-Molodezhi magazine No. 7-8 for 1943: “Wherever the subscriber is - at home, away or at work, in the foyer of a theater, on the tribune of a stadium, watching competitions - everywhere he can turn on his individual monophone in one of the many ends of the branches of the wave network. Several subscribers can connect to one end, and no matter how many there are, they will not interfere with each other. friend.” Due to the fact that the principles of cellular communications had not yet been invented, Babat proposed using an extensive network of microwave waveguides to connect mobile phones with the base station.

G. Babat, who proposed the idea of ​​a mobile phone

In December 1947, Douglas Ring and Ray Young, employees of the American company Bell, proposed the principle of hexagonal cells for mobile telephony. This happened right in the midst of intense efforts to create a phone that could be used to make calls from a car. The first such service was launched in 1946 in St. Louis by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1947 a system was launched with intermediate stations along the highway, allowing calls from a car on the way from New York to Boston. However, due to imperfections and high cost, these systems were not commercially successful. In 1948, another American telephone company in Richmond managed to establish an auto-dialing car radio telephone service, which was already better. The weight of the equipment of such systems was tens of kilograms and it was placed in the trunk, so the thought of a pocket version did not arise for an inexperienced person to look at it.

Domestic car radiotelephone. Radio, 1947, No. 5.

However, as noted in the same 1946 in the journal “Science and Life”, No. 10, domestic engineers G. Shapiro and I. Zakharchenko developed a telephone communication system from a moving car with a city network, the mobile device of which had a power of only 1 watt and fit under the instrument panel. The power was from a car battery.

The telephone number assigned to the car was connected to the radio installed at the city telephone exchange. To call a city subscriber, you had to turn on the device in the car, which sent your call signs on the air. They were perceived by the base station on the city PBX and the telephone set immediately turned on, working like a regular telephone. When calling a car, the city subscriber dialed the number, this activated the base station, the signal of which was received by the device on the car.

As can be seen from the description, this system was something like a radio tube. During experiments carried out in Moscow in 1946, a range of over 20 km was achieved, and a conversation with Odessa was carried out with excellent audibility. Subsequently, the inventors worked to increase the radius of the base station to 150 km.

It was expected that the telephone system of Shapiro and Zakharchenko would be widely used in the work of fire brigades, air defense units, police, emergency medical and technical assistance. However, there was no further information about the development of the system. It can be assumed that it was considered more expedient for emergency rescue services to use their own departmental communication systems rather than use the GTS.

Alfred Gross could become the creator of the first mobile phone.

In the USA, the inventor Alfred Gross was the first to try to do the impossible. Since 1939, he was passionate about creating portable walkie-talkies, which decades later were called “walkie-talkies.” In 1949, he created a device based on a walkie-talkie, which he called a “wireless remote telephone.” The device could be carried with you, and it gave the owner a signal to answer the phone. It is believed that this was the first simple pager. Gross even implemented it in one of the hospitals in New York, but telephone companies showed no interest in this new product, or in his other ideas in this direction. So America lost the chance to become the birthplace of the first practically working mobile phone.

However, these ideas were developed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USSR. So, one of those who continued the search in the field of mobile communications in our country was Leonid Kupriyanovich. The press of that time reported very little about his personality. It was known that he lived in Moscow, his activities were sparingly described by the press as a “radio engineer” or “radio amateur.” It is also known that Kupriyanovich could be considered a successful person at that time - in the early 60s he had a car.

The consonance of the surnames of Kupriyanovich and Cooper is only the initial link in a chain of strange coincidences in the fate of these individuals. Kupriyanovich, like Cooper and Gross, also started with miniature walkie-talkies - he has been making them since the mid-50s, and many of his designs are striking even now - both in their dimensions and in the simplicity and originality of their solutions. The tube radio he created in 1955 weighed the same as the first transistor walkie-talkies of the early 60s.

Pocket walkie-talkie Kupriyanovich 1955

In 1957, Kupriyanovich demonstrates an even more amazing thing - a walkie-talkie the size of a matchbox and weighing only 50 grams (including power supplies), which can work without changing the power supply for 50 hours and provides communication at a range of two kilometers - quite comparable to products of the 21st century, which can be seen on the windows of current communication stores (photo from the magazine YUT, 3, 1957). As evidenced by the publication in YuT, 12, 1957, this radio station used mercury or manganese batteries.

At the same time, Kupriyanovich not only did without microcircuits, which simply did not exist at that time, but also used miniature lamps together with transistors. In 1957 and 1960, the first and second editions of his book for radio amateurs were published, with the promising title “Pocket Radios.”

The 1960 publication describes a simple radio with just three transistors that can be worn on the wrist - much like the famous watch-talkie from the film "Off Season". The author offered it for repetition by tourists and mushroom pickers, but in real life it was mainly students who showed interest in this design of Kupriyanovich - for tips on exams, which was even included in an episode of Gaidaev’s film comedy “Operation Y”

Kupriyanovich's wrist radio

And, just like Cooper, pocket walkie-talkies inspired Kupriyanovich to make a radiotelephone from which he could call any city telephone, and which he could take with him anywhere. The pessimistic sentiments of foreign companies could not stop a man who knew how to make walkie-talkies from matchboxes.

In 1957 L.I. Kupriyanovich received an author's certificate for "Radiophone" - an automatic radiotelephone with direct dialing. Through an automatic telephone radio station from this device it was possible to connect with any subscriber of the telephone network within the range of the Radiofon transmitter. By that time, the first operating set of equipment was ready, demonstrating the principle of operation of the “Radiophone”, called LK-1 by the inventor (Leonid Kupriyanovich, first sample).
By our standards, the LK-1 was still difficult to call a mobile phone, but it made a great impression on its contemporaries. “The telephone device is small in size, its weight does not exceed three kilograms,” wrote Science and Life. “The power batteries are placed inside the body of the device; their continuous use period is 20-30 hours. LK-1 has 4 special radio tubes, so that the power delivered by the antenna is sufficient for short-wave communication over distances of 20-30 kilometers. The device has 2 antennas; On its front panel there are 4 call switches, a microphone (outside of which headphones are connected) and a dial for dialing.”

Just like in a modern cell phone, Kupriyanovich’s device was connected to the city telephone network through a base station (the author called it ATR - automatic telephone radio station), which received signals from mobile phones to the wired network and transmitted signals from the wired network to mobile phones. 50 years ago, the principles of operation of a mobile phone were described for inexperienced cleaners simply and figuratively: “The ATP connection with any subscriber occurs like a regular telephone, only we control its operation from a distance.”
To operate the mobile phone with the base station, four communication channels were used at four frequencies: two channels were used for transmitting and receiving sound, one for dialing and one for hanging up.

Kupriyanovich's first mobile phone. (“Science and Life, 8, 1957”). On the right is the base station.

The reader may suspect that the LK-1 was a simple radio tube for a telephone. But it turns out that this is not so. “The question involuntarily arises: won’t several simultaneously operating LK-1s interfere with each other?” - writes the same “Science and Life”. “No, because in this case the device uses different tonal frequencies, causing its relays to operate on the ATP (the tonal frequencies will be transmitted on the same wavelength). The frequencies of sound transmission and reception will be different for each device in order to avoid their mutual influence.”

Thus, in LK-1 there was encoding of the number in the telephone itself, and not depending on the wire line, which allows it to be rightfully considered as the first mobile phone. True, judging by the description, this coding was very primitive, and the number of subscribers who had the opportunity to work through one ATP was at first very limited. In addition, in the first demonstrator, the ATP was simply connected to a regular telephone parallel to the existing subscriber point - this made it possible to begin experiments without making changes to the city PBX, but made it difficult to simultaneously “go into the city” from several handsets. However, in 1957 the LK-1 existed in only one copy.

Using the first mobile phone was not as convenient as it is now. (“UT, 7, 1957″)

Nevertheless, the practical possibility of implementing a wearable mobile phone and organizing such a mobile communication service, at least in the form of departmental switches, has been proven. “The range of the device... is several tens of kilometers,” writes Leonid Kupriyanovich in a note for the July 1957 issue of the magazine “Young Technician”. “If within these limits there is only one receiving device, this will be enough to talk with any city resident who has a telephone, and for any number of kilometers.” “Radiotelephones...can be used on vehicles, airplanes and ships. Passengers will be able to call home, work, or book a hotel room directly from the plane. It will find use among tourists, builders, hunters, etc.” In addition, Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would be able to displace phones built into cars. At the same time, the young inventor immediately used something like a “hands free” headset, i.e. A speakerphone was used instead of an earpiece. In an interview with M. Melgunova, published in the magazine “Behind the Wheel”, 12, 1957, Kupriyanovich intended to introduce mobile phones in two stages. “At first, while there are few radio telephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near the car owner’s home telephone. But later, when there are thousands of such devices, ATP will no longer work for one radiotelephone, but for hundreds and thousands. Moreover, all of them will not interfere with each other, since each of them will have its own tonal frequency, causing its own relay to work.” Thus, Kupriyanovich essentially positioned two types of household appliances at once - simple radio handsets, which were easier to put into production, and a mobile phone service, in which one base station serves thousands of subscribers.

One can be surprised how accurately Kupriyanovich imagined more than half a century ago how widely the mobile phone would become part of our everyday life.
“By taking such a radiophone with you, you are essentially taking an ordinary telephone set, but without wires,” he wrote a couple of years later. “No matter where you are, you can always be found by phone, you just have to dial the known number of your radiophone from any landline phone (even from a pay phone). The phone rings in your pocket and you start a conversation. If necessary, you can dial any city telephone number directly from a tram, trolleybus, or bus, call an ambulance, fire truck or emergency vehicle, or contact your home...”
It's hard to believe that these words were written by a person who has not visited the 21st century. However, for Kupriyanovich there was no need to travel to the future. He built it.

The 1958 model of a mobile phone, including its power source, weighed only 500 grams.

This milestone was again taken by world technical thought only... March 6, 1983, i.e. a quarter of a century later. True, Kupriyanovich’s model was not so elegant and was a box with toggle switches and a round dialer disk, to which a regular telephone handset was connected via a wire. It turned out that when talking, either both hands were occupied, or the box had to be hung on the belt. On the other hand, holding a light plastic tube from a household phone in your hands was much more convenient than a device with the weight of an army pistol (According to Martin Cooper, using a mobile phone helped him pump up his muscles well).

According to Kupriyanovich’s calculations, his device should have cost 300-400 Soviet rubles. It was equal to the cost of a good television or a light motorcycle; At such a price, the device would, of course, not be available to every Soviet family, but quite a few would be able to save up for it if they wanted. Commercial mobile phones of the early 80s with a price of 3500-4000 US dollars were also not affordable for all Americans - the millionth subscriber appeared only in 1990.

According to L.I. Kupriyanovich in his article published in the February issue of the magazine “Technology for Youth” for 1959, it was now possible to place up to a thousand communication channels of radiophones with the Asia-Pacific region on one wavelength. To do this, the encoding of the number in the radiophone was done in a pulsed manner, and during a conversation the signal was compressed using a device that the author of the radiophone called a correlator. According to the description in the same article, the work of the correlator was based on the vocoder principle - dividing the speech signal into several frequency ranges, compressing each range and subsequent restoration at the reception site. True, voice recognition should have deteriorated, but given the quality of wired communications at that time, this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing ATP on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees fifteen years later installed a base station on top of a 50-story building in New York). And judging by the phrase “pocket radiophones made by the author of this article,” we can conclude that in 1959 Kupriyanovich manufactured at least two experimental mobile phones.

The device of 1958 was already more similar to mobile phones

“So far there are only prototypes of the new device, but there is no doubt that it will soon become widespread in transport, in the city telephone network, in industry, on construction sites, etc.” Kupriyanovich writes in the journal “Science and Life” in August 1957. However, three years later, any publications about the further fate of the development, which threatens to revolutionize communications, completely disappear in the press. Moreover, the inventor himself does not disappear anywhere; for example, in the February issue of "UT" for 1960, he publishes a description of a radio station with automatic calling and a range of 40-50 km, and in the January issue of the same "Technology for Youth" for 1961 - a popular article about microelectronics technologies, in which There is no mention of a radiophone.

All this is so strange and unusual that it involuntarily suggests the thought: was there really a working radiophone?

Skeptics first of all pay attention to the fact that the publications that popular science publications devoted to the radiophone did not cover the sensational fact of the first telephone calls. It is also impossible to accurately determine from photographs whether the inventor is calling on a cell phone or is simply posing. This gives rise to a version: yes, there was an attempt to create a mobile phone, but technically the device could not be completed, so no more was written about it. However, let us think about the question: why on earth should journalists of the 50s consider the call to be a separate event worthy of mention in the press? “So this means a telephone? Not bad, not bad. And it turns out that you can also call on it? This is just a miracle! I would never have believed it!”

Common sense dictates that not a single Soviet popular science magazine would write about a non-working structure in 1957-1959. Such magazines already had something to write about. Satellites fly in space. Physicists have found that a cascade hyperon decays into a lambda-zero particle and a negative pi-meson. Sound technicians restored the original sound of Lenin's voice. Thanks to the TU-104, you can get from Moscow to Khabarovsk in 11 hours 35 minutes. Computers translate from one language to another and play chess. Construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station has begun. Schoolchildren from the Chkalovskaya station made a robot that sees and speaks. Against the backdrop of these events, the creation of a mobile phone is not a sensation at all. Readers are waiting for video phones! “Telephone sets with screens can be built even today, our technology is strong enough,” they write in the same “TM” ... in 1956. “Millions of television viewers are waiting for the radio industry to start producing televisions with color images... It’s high time to think about television broadcasting via wire (cable TV - O.I.),” we read in the same issue. And here, you see, the mobile phone is somehow outdated, even without a video camera and a color display. Well, who would write even half a word about her if she didn’t work?

Then why did the “first call” come to be considered a sensation? The answer is simple: Martin Cooper wanted it that way. On April 3, 1973, he carried out a PR campaign. In order for Motorola to obtain permission to use radio frequencies for civilian mobile communications from the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC), it was necessary to somehow show that mobile communications really had a future. Moreover, competitors were vying for the same frequencies. And it’s no coincidence that Martin Cooper’s first call, according to his own story to journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle, was addressed to a rival: “It was a guy from AT&T who was promoting phones for cars. His name was Joel Angel. I called him and told him that I was calling from the street, from a real “handheld” cell phone. I don't remember what he answered. But you know, I heard his teeth grinding.”

Kupriyanovich did not need to share frequencies with a competing company in 1957 - 1959 and listen to their gnashing of teeth on a mobile phone. He did not even need to catch up and overtake America, due to the absence of other participants in the race. Like Cooper, Kupriyanovich also carried out PR campaigns - as was customary in the USSR. He came to the editorial offices of popular science publications, demonstrated the devices, and wrote articles about them himself. It is likely that the letters “YUT” in the name of the first device are a device to interest the editors of “Young Technician” to publish it. For unknown reasons, the topic of the radiophone was only covered by the country's leading amateur radio magazine - "Radio", as well as all other designs of Kupriyanovich - except for the pocket walkie-talkie of 1955.

Did Kupriyanovich himself have motives for showing a non-working device - for example, to achieve success or recognition? In publications of the 50s, the inventor’s place of work is not indicated; the media present him to readers as a “radio amateur” or “engineer.” However, it is known that Leonid Ivanovich lived and worked in Moscow, he was awarded the academic degree of Candidate of Technical Sciences, he subsequently worked at the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and in the early 60s had a car (for which, by the way, he himself created a radiotelephone and an anti-theft radio alarm system) . In other words, by Soviet standards he was a successful person. Doubters can also check a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including the LK-1 adapted for young technicians. From all this it follows that the 1958 mobile phone was built and worked.

Altai-1″ in the late 50s looked like a more realistic project than pocket mobile phones

Unlike Kupriyanovich’s radiophone, Altai had specific customers on whom the allocation of funds depended. In addition, the main problem in implementing both projects was not at all in creating a portable device, but in the need for significant investments and time in creating a communication infrastructure and its debugging and the costs of its maintenance. During the deployment of Altai, for example, in Kyiv, transmitter output lamps failed, and in Tashkent, problems arose due to poor-quality installation of base station equipment. As Radio magazine wrote, in 1968 the Altai system was deployed only in Moscow and Kyiv, followed by Samarkand, Tashkent, Donetsk and Odessa.

In the Altai system, it was easier to provide terrain coverage, because the subscriber could move up to 60 km from the central base station, and outside the city there were enough linear stations located along roads for 40-60 km. Eight transmitters served up to 500-800 subscribers, and the transmission quality was comparable only to digital communications. The implementation of this project looked more realistic than the deployment of a national cellular network based on Radiofon.

However, the idea of ​​a mobile phone, despite its apparent untimeliness, was not buried at all. There were also industrial samples of the device!

Western European countries also attempted to create mobile communications before Cooper's historic call. So, April 11, 1972, i.e. a year earlier, the British company Pye Telecommunications demonstrated at the Communications Today, Tomorrow and the Future exhibition at London's Royal Lancaster Hotel a portable mobile phone that could be used to call the city's telephone network.
The mobile phone consisted of a Pocketphone 70 walkie-talkie, used by the police, and a set-top box - a handset with a push-button dial that could be held in your hands. The phone operated in the range of 450-470 MHz, judging by the Pocketphone 70 radio, it could have up to 12 channels and was powered by a 15 V source.

There is also information about the existence in France in the 60s of a mobile phone with semi-automatic switching of subscribers. The digits of the dialed number were displayed on dekatrons at the base station, after which the telephone operator manually performed the switching. At the moment, there is no exact information why such a strange dialing system was adopted; one can only assume that a possible reason was errors in transmitting the number, which were corrected by the telephone operator.

Instead of an epilogue. 30 years after the creation of LK-1, on April 9, 1987, at the KALASTAJATORPPA hotel in Helsinki (Finland), General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee M.S. Gorbachev made a mobile call to the USSR Ministry of Communications in the presence of Nokia Vice President Stefan Widomski. Thus, the mobile phone has become a means of influencing the minds of politicians - just like the first satellite during the time of Khrushchev. Although, unlike a satellite, a working mobile phone was not actually an indicator of technical superiority - the same Khrushchev was able to call using it...

“Wait!” - the reader will object. “So who should be considered the creator of the first mobile phone - Cooper, Kupriyanovich, Bachvarov?”
It seems that there is no point in contrasting the results of the work here. Economic opportunities for mass use of the new service emerged only in 1990.

It is possible that there were other attempts to create a wearable mobile phone that were ahead of their time, and humanity will someday remember them.

Who invented the mobile phone?

The cell phone is only 32 years old. The mobile “first-born” weighed a whole kilogram and cost exorbitant money by today’s standards - $3,900 (for comparison, a Ford Mustang Mach 1 could be purchased for $3,300).

Most people believe that a mobile phone does not have a specific inventor, like, say, a television. This is not so, although different companies are still challenging the championship. The history of the invention of the first cell phone dates back to the post-war period. It was then that AT&T, or rather its Bell Laboratories research laboratory, first came up with the idea of ​​​​creating a mobile phone. True, the developers were going to make phones only for cars. A person will not walk with a 30-40 kg (and this without a power source!) apparatus in his hands! Telephones gradually became smaller and by the 70s of the twentieth century they “lost weight” to 12 - 14 kilograms, but still worked only from the car’s on-board network.

At the same time, Motorola, known for its portable radios, was approaching the development of cell phones. In 1954, its department for the development of new portable communication devices was headed by Illinois Institute of Technology graduate Martin Cooper. In 1967, a group of young engineers led by Cooper creates small-format walkie-talkies for the Chicago police. After some time, Martin comes to the idea of ​​​​the real possibility of creating mobile phones. But even in his own company they do not immediately support him. “People thought I was crazy when I tried to explain to them that a small, pocket-sized cordless telephone was not only possible, but would be a huge success,” says cell phone inventor Martin Cooper. necessarily having to find a telephone booth or pay phone on the wall, someone will pay money.”

In the spring of 1973, installers installed a base station at the top of a 50-story skyscraper in New York. And on April 3, 1973, on the corner of 56th Street and Lexington Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan, a historical event took place. Martin Cooper called Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Laboratories, straight from the street. Why him? The fact is that AT&T developed cellular technology years before Motorola. But in the 60s and 70s, both companies stubbornly competed: who would make communication more practical and convenient. Martin could not resist the courage that gripped him and the temptation to clearly demonstrate who had won. As Cooper himself later said, he uttered the following words: “Imagine, Joel, I’m calling you from the world’s first cell phone. It’s in my hands, and I’m walking down a New York street.”

Cooper, now 75 years old, is president of ArrayComm in San Jose, California. Given Cooper's well-deserved highest authority, it is worth taking a closer look at his new area of ​​activity: Cooper's company is working on so-called "smart" antennas and is about to make another breakthrough in wireless technology.

“It’s funny to be part of history: what better thing can you do in life than try to change the world? The cell phone gave freedom, and that’s what I’m proud of,” smiles Martin Cooper. Such is the beautiful history of the tiny and elegant device that you may be holding to your ear at this moment.

By the way
The first Dyna-Tac cell phone was a handset weighing about 1.15 kg and measuring 22.5 x 12.5 x 3.75 cm. There were 12 keys on the front panel, 10 of them digital and two for making a call and ending a call. No display, no additional functions. The battery allowed communication for as long as 35 minutes, but it took more than 10 hours to charge it.

1875 telephone from Boston

We have all long been accustomed to the fact that we can communicate with each other while located at long distances, in different cities, countries and even in different parts of the planet. A means of communication such as the telephone helps us with this. And how difficult it is to imagine that once upon a time people did not have such an opportunity at all. After all, the first telephone was invented only 135 years ago.

The very first telephone in the world was invented in 1875 in Boston. Two scientists, Alexander Bell and Thomas Waston, decided to use a pair of membranes that controlled electromagnets, which later became the basis for the entire telephone design.

The device of the first phone

Since ancient times, humanity has dreamed of learning how to transmit information over long distances. The idea of ​​creating a telephone was in the air. Then, drums, messengers, as well as various conventional signs, such as the smoke of a fire, the color of a sail, and so on, acted through communication.

A chain of Gallic screamers notified their city about the advance of Caesar's army, while the speed of information transmission reached only 100 km/h. And the medieval buildings of Pskov hid within their walls narrow passages, through which messages were once transmitted and received.

In France in 1789, mechanic Claude Chappe proposed to erect towers around the country and install devices made of slats on them that would be visible from a great distance, and at night light lights on these slats. The telegraph operator had to change the slats, focusing on the previous tower, and the next one therefore copied it. Thus, a message was transmitted along the chain.

It was the American Page who first came up with the idea of ​​using electricity to transmit sound. Graham Bell from America and his assistant Tom Watson, and Philip Reis from Friedrichsdorf subsequently took part in improving this technology.

In 1876, on February 15, Graham Bell patented his invention in the United States - the telephone. And in the same year, on March 10, the first voice message was transmitted with its help.

Elena Polenova, Samogo.Net

The first mobile phone appeared in 1983. From that moment on, phones began to develop rapidly in terms of design and functionality. The modern iPhone, with its thousands of applications and games, high-quality photos and videos, can no longer be compared with that modest first Motorola. Since that first moment, thousands of different phone models have appeared.

In 2007, a revolution called “3G” took place. The advent of 3G networks has made it possible to reduce the load on cellular communication channels and significantly expand the capabilities of subscribers. And the capabilities of phones, of course. A modern mobile phone, easily fitting in the palm of your hand, has a range of functions that in the 80s were available to a “portable” computer the size of a briefcase.

What were they like, the first phones?

The first was the telephone from Motorola with the mysterious name DynaTac. It was a heavy tube with buttons and a protruding antenna. The phone hardly fit in the hand and had a minimal number of functions for making calls.

In six years, the Motorola phone has evolved into a truly portable model - MicroTac. These phones had a small docking station and were installed in cars. However, they have not yet fit into a clothing pocket.

The next stage of development has ended in 1992 model output Motorola International. It was the first fully digital mobile phone. An elegant, thin for those times handset with buttons and an antenna. Around the same time, Nokia 1011 appeared - the first mass-produced GSM phone. The phone had a liquid crystal screen located in the upper part of the body and a short antenna, a few centimeters long. At the same time, the first PDA from IBM appeared, or, as it was called, a combo phone.

In 1996 Motorola releases first phone - flip phone. Sleek, slim phone with a two-line LED display. At the top of the clamshell there was only a speaker. There was a thin antenna in the upper right corner of the phone.

An alternative to the model described above was the telephone banana Nokia 8110, made popular in the first Matrix film. The phone was equipped with a small but very informative monochrome display. The keyboard was covered with a plastic cover that moved down, at the lower end of which there was a microphone.

The first series of smartphones was Nokia 9000 Communicator. The phone looked like an opening pencil case, in one half of which there was a colored oblong screen, and on the second there was a full-fledged keyboard. This smartphone was built on an Intel 386 processor. In 1998 this communicator has become significantly lighter and has evolved into model 9110i.

Mass model mobile phones at this time became Nokia 5110. It looked quite modest - a black candy bar with a screen, buttons and a small antenna. The phone had basic functions and was available to customers. By 1999 he grew up up to Nokia 8210, in a more stylish design, with additional functionality.

The first phone with a WAP browser was Nokia 7110. A flat phone with a fairly large screen. Like the “banana”, the keyboard was closed with a lid that moved down.

Nokia 5120: a phone for all occasions. The model was distinguished by the fact that it had a shock-resistant, waterproof case, which, among other things, could be replaced.

The first phone with GPS was Benefon ESC. The phone was made in a candybar form factor, had a large screen and a stylish black and silver design.

The first phone with an mp3 player Samsung SPH-M100

The first phone with a built-in mp3 player was the Samsung SPH-M100, a silver phone with a flip-up microphone.

During the same period there appeared legendary Nokia 3210. The phone was different in that it had an internal antenna and T9 smart input for entering messages. Was sold about 160 million these phones.

In 2000 appeared first touch screen phone. It was Ericsson R380. The phone had a monochrome screen, a decent part of which was hidden behind a folding keyboard.

At the same time, another popular legendary phone - Nokia 3310. The model became one of the most popular: about 126 million phones were sold.

Nokia 8310 appeared in 2001. The phone was equipped with additional features that were new at that time: Infrared port, functional calendar and FM radio.

Then a miniature one appeared Ericsson T39 - the first phone with Bluetooth. Very quickly it evolved into the T66, which is no taller than a pack of cigarettes. The T68 model already had a color screen.

Siemens at the same time releases a model S45, the first GPRS phone with 360kb internal memory, which was quite a lot at the time.

In 2002 appeared Nokia 3510, designed to bring Internet services to the masses. The 3510i version had a color screen.

The first phone with a built-in camera was the Nokia 7650 slider.

At the same time appeared Sony Ericsson P800, a smartphone with a touch screen and 128 MB of memory. The phone had a nice light blue design.

In 2003 appeared Nokia 1100, another bestseller. Since release it has been 200 million copies sold.

Then they appeared Nokia N-Gage and PalmOne, telephone gadgets, as well as Nokia 6600, Symbian OS phone. A model Nokia 7600 became one of the first 3G smartphones, the lightest and smallest.

In 2004 legendary appears Motorola Razor V3, which set the standard in design for the industry. And the smartphone Nokia 7610 became the first to carry a 1-megapixel camera on board. Its brother Nokia 3220 offered full access to the Internet.

In 2005 appeared Nokia 1110- a budget GSM phone for developing countries. In parallel, its antipode appears - HTC Universal, the first 3G PDA with Windows Mobile.

In 2006 was released Nokia N73, a phone that garnered a following over the next few years. At the same time appeared Nokia E62 - the first business phone.

2007 marked the appearance of the iPhone. It was a phone with a rotation sensor and a Multi-Touch interface. The phone instantly captured a significant market share. In response, Apple released the HTC Touch phone, with its own Multi-Touch interface and high screen resolution.

In 2008 appeared iPhone 3G, an even more desirable model for all applications that can be purchased in the AppStore.

Then he appeared T-Mobile G1, Google's first Android phone. By April 2009, one million phones had been sold.

At the same time, the legendary Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, a mobile phone for music lovers. It should also be noted the business smartphone Nokia E63, LG Dare with handwriting recognition, Nokia N79 with a 5-megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics. LG KC910 already had an 8-megapixel camera and a xenon flash.

LG Arena appeared in 2009- first phone with 3D interface. At the same time, the BlackBerry Curve 8900 appeared with a convenient trackball and high screen resolution. Unfortunately, 2G. It is worth noting the appearance of LG Versa - a phone with a connected QWERTY keyboard and a virtual keyboard on the touch screen.

From that moment on, the evolution of mobile phones occurred in leaps and bounds. Almost every modern phone model now has widgets for communicating on popular social networks. Some models, such as the Sony Ericsson Cyber-Shot, have powerful optics and a high-resolution camera on board. Already, mobile phones have functionality close to the capabilities of a personal computer. Phones with touch screens are replacing traditional all-in-one PCs. What will be next? 3D projection displays? What are mobile phones evolving into now?