THE HISTORY OF MOBILE PHONES - the early stages.

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of the ‘mobile’ phone is far from a contemporary idea. In fact, only a few years after the Second World War, the technology that is used in our mobile phones today (albeit much less advanced) was developed, and used in a variety of occupations. The emergency services took full advantage of this, especially in vehicles – using the ‘mobile radio telephone technology’ to communicate with each other via radios. Those in the construction trade, and especially ‘truckers’ also made use of the technology – they would place a transmitter/receiver somewhere in the vehicle in order to send and receive communication, and would therefore speak and listen through a handset placed somewhere close to the driver.

It had been Motorola who had been at the forefront of this radio mobile technology, especially in taxi-cabs across America, yet in 1973, the company stunned reporters by publicly testing a new prototype mobile phone, in which an employee of the company successfully made a call from the street, to a colleague in a nearby office. This became a precursor for a second piece of mobile phone history made ten years later – The Motorola Company, in 1983, introduced the first generation of mobile phone available to the public. These early phones are often fondly remembered as ‘brick phones’ due to their bulky appearance – they were also badly affected by poor signals and interference due to their use of radio analogue technology, rather than digital.