The History of Cell Phones

Mobile Telephone Service

Jun 17, 1946

Mobile Telephone ServiceIn 1946 in St. Louis, the Mobile Telephone Service was introduced. Although it was popular and commercially successful, the service was limited by having only a few voice channels per district.

First Analog Mobile Call

Apr 3, 1973

Martin Cooper 3 April 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first analog mobile phone call using a heavy prototype model.

Prior to 1973

Apr 3, 1973

Prior to 1973, cellular mobile phone technology was limited to phones installed in cars and other vehicles

Radio Telephone System

Oct 17, 1973

Radio Cooper of Motorola is the first inventor named on "Radio telephone system" filed on 17 October 1973 with the US Patent Office.

1G

Feb 7, 1979

In 1979 a cellular network (the 1G generation) was launched in Japan by NTT

UK's First Mobile Call

Jan 1, 1985

VodafoneVodafone made the UK's first mobile call at a few minutes past midnight on 1 January 1985

SMS message

Dec 3, 1992

The first machine-generated SMS message was sent in the UK on 3 December 1992 followed in 1993 by the first person-to-person SMS sent in Finland.

4G

Feb 7, 2009

By 2009, it had become clear that, at some point, 4G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media