Archaic Telecom

So Who Invented the Cell Phone Again?

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CNET has gone on a spelunking expedition into the recent AT&T FCC filing and brought a few things up to the surface. One nugget that caught my attention is from a document written by AT&T’s Chief Technology Officer, John Donovan.

Donovan says AT&T “invented the first mobile phone and the first mobile network”.

Wait, wasn’t there another company involved? It will come back to me.

Starts with an ‘M’.  Motorola!

Thanks to my Aardvark network and researching though some old books, courtesy of Google, the names that come up as the father of the cell phone are Martin Cooper and Rudy Krolopp, who were both granted a patent in 1975.

In consulting Inventors and Inventions, Volume II (Marshall Cavendish, 2008), we learn that Motorola was in a race with AT&T’s Bell Labs that began in the 1960s. At that time, each firm was working on their own walkie-talkie radio.

The race was given a good push forward in 1971 when the FCC agreed to consider a proposal by AT&T to set aside spectrum for a mobile radio network.

Meanwhile, Martin Cooper, who led Motorola’s wireless research, gave the assignment of developing a portable cell phone to Rudy Krolopp. To be completed in six weeks!

Krolopp and his team delivered. In 1973, Cooper had in his hands (you needed both) a 28-pound mobile device. While walking around the streets of New York City with the new cell phone, he decided to call rival Bell engineer Joel Engel.

There was an “embarrassing silence on the other end” when Engel received the call from Cooper.

AT&T did innovate with the concept of a cellular network, in which low-power transmitters would cover hexagonal areas and handoff connections as users moved through the network. This idea dates back to much earlier research done by AT&T.

And in fact, Cooper borrowed the cell concept from AT&T.

But the first cell phone, in its modern form? That would go to Motorola, and to the work of Cooper and Krolopp.

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