2-1 Research & Inquiry

The Dr. Binocs Show.

Kitty: Oh no! Battery died!

Dr. Binocs: Well, of course, it will, after all, you have been playing games for who knows how many hours.

Kitty: We need a better phone.

Dr. Binocs: Hmm. That's what someone must have thought years ago that changed the face of telephone forever.

Kitty: Who was it?

Dr. Binocs: I'm glad you asked that. So in today's episode let us look into a brief history of phones by answering a ringing question, 'Who Invented Cell Phones?' Zoom in!

Cell phones! We use them to make calls, send messages, video chat, manage work and play games. Plus there are chances that most of you must be watching this video on your smartphone.

So no wonder, today, it's hard to imagine a world without the cell phone as it has become an integral part of our daily lives. But, do you know how it all began and who invented them?

Well, to get the answer we need to travel back to 1900 and meet an inventor named Reginald Fessenden, who for the first time managed to transmit the human voice via radio waves, sending a signal from one radio tower to another.

Meanwhile, the wired telephone technology was also progressing and a Swedish inventor named Lars Magnus Ericsson managed to invent 'Carphones' as a fun retirement project. This technology was later bettered by a man in Philadelphia named W. W. Macfarlane, but it still had a long way to go.

Then in 1947, an engineer named William Rae Young working at Bell Labs proposed that radio towers arranged in a hexagonal pattern could support a telephone network for car phones.

Soon, the car phones became popular among rich people and telephone companies started to compete aggressively to enhance this technology further.

One such competitor was Motorola which didn't want anyone to have a monopoly on the cellphones. So they put their visionary executive Martin Cooper, an American engineer in charge of an urgent project to invent the cell phone.

Cooper thought that the cell phone should not be chained to the car but should be portable. And after working for years, Cooper along with his team invented the first handheld wireless cell phone in 1973.

This phone was called the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which was 9 inches long, weighed around 2.5 pounds or 1.1 kilograms and allowed 35 minutes of Talktime before its battery ran down.

And after spending millions of dollars on this revolutionary concept, Motorola made their invention available to the public in 1983. And despite its price of $3,995, which is equivalent to $10,000 today, the DynaTAC was a huge success.

In the coming years, many companies started building wireless phones with lesser weight, smaller sizes, and better digital service at cheaper cost which made personal cell phones more available to the middle class and brought a cell phone revolution in the 90s.

Part of this revolution was IBM's Simon released in 1994, which is considered the world's first smartphone that featured software apps and a touchscreen.

And since then cellphone technology kept growing better and who knows where it will lead us to. I know what you are thinking, but how do these devices work? Well, to know that, please check out our video, 'How Cell Phone Works?' The link is in the description below.

Trivia Time!

Did you know the first cell phone call made by Martin Cooper was a prank call to tease his competitor? Yes, he made the call to Joel Engel, who was doing similar work at Bell Labs.

Hope you learned something new today. Until next time, it's me, Dr. Binocs, Zooming Out!

Dr. Binocs: Oh what are you inventing Kitty?

Kitty: Battery-less phone.

Dr. Binocs: Well, nothing is impossible! Isn't it friends?