As with the elevator (lift) and the helicopter, it's bordering on the ridiculous to give credit to any one individual as the "inventor" of the mobile phone. Martin Cooper is widely regarded as the "father" of the mobile phone ... but not universally. A website called The Great Idea Finder credits the invention of the mobile phone to Richard Frenkiel and Joel Engel, two researchers at the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), who developed technology in the early 1970s to divide wireless communications into a series of cells, then automatically switched callers as they moved so that each cell could be reused.
Mobile telephones had been introduced by AT&T in 1946, but the technology was primitive. Each metropolitan area had a single transmitter on a central tower, providing just a handful of channels, and up to eight receiver towers to handle the call return signals. At most, three subscribers could make calls at any one time in each city. It was, in effect, a massive party line, where subscribers would have to listen to check that there was no one else on the line before making a call.
Another weakness of the first mobile phones was that the large amount of power needed to run them could only be supplied by car batteries. This is why the first mobile phones were not truly portable but could only be used in cars.
In 1947, AT&T Bell Laboratories engineers Rae Young and Douglas Ring showed that more mobile users could be served by breaking down a large area into many smaller cells. This required more frequency coverage than was available at that time, and it wasn't until the 1960s that Frenkiel and Engel (see above) were able to develop the technology to make it work.
In 1971, AT&T turned Frenkiel and Engel's work into a proposal to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). AT&T's rival Motorola feared the end of its mobile communications business, and urgently needed to get into the cellphone market.
Martin Cooper, who was then the head of Motorola's communications systems division, was placed in charge of the project to develop a mobile phone. His vision was to make the cellphone truly mobile, and not chained to the car. His project resulted in the DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) phone. It was 23 cm (9 inches) tall, weighed 1.1 kg (2.5 pounds), and allowed 35 minutes of talk before a ten–hour recharge.
Cooper introduced the DynaTAC phone at a press conference in New York on 3 April 1973. Before the press conference, to make sure that it worked, he gleefully made the first public mobile phone call to none other than his counterpart at AT&T – Joel Engel.
In 1983, after years of further development, Motorola introduced the first portable cell phone for consumers: the DynaTAC 8000x. Despite its price of $3,995, the phone was a success. That same year, Cooper left Motorola and founded his own company: Cellular Business Systems, Inc. (CBSI), which became the market leader in billing cellular phone services. He and his wife, Arlene Harris, subsequently founded several other companies in the mobile phone field.
So, to summarise: Rae Young and Douglas Ring conceived the idea that would make mobile phones work in theory; Richard Frenkiel and Joel Engel developed the technology that made it work in practice, but Martin Cooper led the team that developed a mobile phone, and made the first mobile phone call.
Wikipedia also credits John F. Mitchell, Motorola's chief of portable communication products and Martin Cooper's boss in 1973, with a key role in advancing the development of handheld mobile telephone equipment.
Mobile phones reached the UK in 1985. As any UK–based quizzer should know, the first 'public' mobile phone call in the UK was made by the comedian Ernie Wise. He did it on New Year's Day 1985, from outside the Dickens public house in St. Catherine's Dock, London, to the headquarters of Vodafone. He dressed in full Dickensian coachman's garb for the occasion; you can see a photograph here.
This page draws on material from Britannica and The Great Ideas Finder, as well as Wikipedia.
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