London calling.

Time to take a break from ranting on about low level brain activity and powerful people. I was combing the WWW looking for possible topics when an old movie revue caught my eye. It was for Sabrina, a 50's classic in which, among other things, Humphrey Bogart talks on a mobile phone. Though it is no doubt not a real cell phone, mobile phones were in use in many cities.

So here's what I could find out. The idea of mobile radio is not a new one. Radio receivers have been "portable" for over a 100 years. Combination transmitter/receiver since the 1920s. I am stretching the word portable to mean that the radio was not fixed to base station. In the 1920s, these portables were in either trucks or trains. They were very large, bulky walkie talkies (built into a desk often) and worked like you expected- press to talk then stop and listen.

Although true mobile communication, they had some drawbacks, not the least of which was their size and power consumption, they did not operate in a cell like manner. That is to say they transmitted a signal from one device to be received by another. Cell phones are radio devices that transmit to small repeater transmitters that pass the signal down the line from "cell" to "cell" of repeater transmitters. This cuts down the size, the power requirments and liberated users from being within transmission range of just one transmitter.

These old brutes were finicky and required training to run, again limiting their use to large organizations like railroads and the military. The Second World War saw technology move to more phone like convenience with mobile radios becoming phone handset shaped, though kinda big still, and able to handle full duplex communication: no more press to talk.

Just after the war Bell labs conceived the cell communication concept in an internal memo by D.H.Ring. Although they didn't call it cell phone technology, they essentially described the roots of what the service is.

The challenge for the technology then was how to stay in contact. After all, mobile phones were mobile. And moving around transmitters made it tough to keep a long conversation together. Mobile phones of that time, ( probably the phone that Bogey used), were two way radio hand sets transmittinmg to the local telephone company, AT&T, who patched the call into their hard wired phone service. This service was available in many North American cities then and continued into the 90s in many countries. I have used this service on the West Coast of Canada many times.

Taxis and police services used dedicated radio systems, that were mobile but did not work with the telephone system. In fact early police radios were simply base station transmitters that broadcast over regular radio. When there was something up they sent out a "calling all cars" and the police would stop and use a phone to call in to see whats up.

The FCC throughout this time had no use for giving out radio licenses for mobile phone use. They saw TV as needing as much bandwidth as possible. Finally in the 1960s they relented and Bell, AT&T and Motorola went back to their labs and started cooking. Across the ocean, Ericsson had a fully operational mobile phone sytem in place in Sweden by 1956. Large and bulky, the phones still had to be used within one transmitters range, the technology to "hand off" a call to the next transmitter hadn't been perfected yet.

On April 3, 1973, Dr. Martin Cooper placed the first cell phone call. The rest is history.