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This history of the telephone chronicles the development of the electrical telephone, and includes a brief review of its earlier predecessors.
The following is a brief summary of the history of the development of the telephone:
- 1667: Robert Hooke invented a string telephone that conveyed sounds over an extended wire by mechanical vibrations. It was to be termed an 'acoustic' or 'mechanical' (non-electrical) telephone.
- 1753: Charles Morrison proposes the idea that electricity can be used to transmit messages, by using different wires for each letter.[16]
- 1844: Innocenzo Manzetti first mooted the idea of a "speaking telegraph" (telephone).
- 1854: Charles Bourseul writes a memorandum on the principles of the telephone. (See the article: "Transmission électrique de la parole", L'Illustration, Paris, 26 August 1854.)
- 1854: Antonio Meucci demonstrates an electric voice-operated device in New York; it is not clear what kind of device he demonstrated.
- 1861: Philipp Reis constructs the first speech-transmitting telephone
- 28 December 1871: Antonio Meucci files a patent caveat (No. 3353, a notice of intent to invent, but not a formal patent application) at the U.S. Patent Office for a device he named "Sound Telegraph".[17]
- 1872: Elisha Gray establishes Western Electric Manufacturing Company.
- 1 July 1875: Bell uses a bi-directional "gallows" telephone that was able to transmit "voicelike sounds", but not clear speech. Both the transmitter and the receiver were identical membrane electromagnet instruments.
- 1875: Thomas Edison experiments with acoustic telegraphy and in November builds an electro-dynamic receiver, but does not exploit it.
- 1875: Hungarian Tivadar Puskas (the inventor of telephone exchange) arrived in the USA.
- 6 April 1875: Bell's U.S. Patent 161,739 "Transmitters and Receivers for Electric Telegraphs" is granted. This uses multiple vibrating steel reeds in make-break circuits, and the concept of multiplexed frequencies.
- 20 January 1876: Bell signs and notarizes his patent application for the telephone.
- 11 February 1876: Elisha Gray designs a liquid transmitter for use with a telephone, but does not build one.
- 7 March 1876: Bell's U.S. patent No. 174,465 for the telephone is granted.
- 10 March 1876: Bell transmits the sentence: "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" using a liquid transmitter and an electromagnetic receiver.
- 30 January 1877: Bell's U.S. patent No. 186,787 is granted for an electromagnetic telephone using permanent magnets, iron diaphragms, and a call bell.
- 27 April 1877: Edison files for a patent on a carbon (graphite) transmitter. Patent No. 474,230 was granted on 3 May 1892, after a 15-year delay because of litigation. Edison was granted patent No. 222,390 for a carbon granules transmitter in 1879.
- 6 October 1877: the Scientific American publishes the invention from Bell - at that time still without a ringer.
- 25 October 1877: the article in the Scientific American is discussed at the Telegraphenamt in Berlin
- 12 November 1877: The first commercial telephone company enters telephone business in Friedrichsberg close to Berlin[18] using the Siemens pipe as ringer and telephone devices build by Siemens.
- 1877: The first experimental Telephone Exchange in Boston.
- 1877: First long-distance telephone line
- 1877:Emile Berliner invented the telephone transmitter.
- 28 January 1878: The first commercial US telephone exchange opened in New Haven, Connecticut.
- 1887: Tivadar Puskás introduced the multiplex switchboard.
- 1915: First U.S. coast-to-coast long-distance telephone call, ceremonially inaugurated by A.G. Bell in New York City and his former assistant Thomas Augustus Watson in San Francisco, California.
Mobile phones have changed the way we live our lives and to many, the prospect of a world without voice calling, text messaging and mobile Internet access is an unsettling one. As we all know, mobile phones didn’t just happen overnight. They grew up, just like us.
Mobile phones evolved over five different generations, the latest of which is still being rolled out and adopted by consumers. Don’t worry – by the time most of us will have switched to 4G there will undoubtedly be yet another standard to aspire to.
Today we’ll be dialing into the past and briefly examining the history of mobile phones.
Pre-Standardisation, or “0G”
AT&T were one of the first to commercialize mobile telecommunication in 1947. The service known simply as “Mobile Telephone Service” (MTS) spread to more than a hundred towns and highway paths by the end of the year. The service relied on an operator to connect both incoming and outgoing calls.
The telephones used were not particularly portable and used a half-duplex “press to speak” system where the caller would have to release the button to hear the other person. That very same year two Bell Labs engineers proposed the foundations for the modern cellular network. At the time the plans were daring, and it took until the 1960s for the plans to be implemented and even longer to come to market.
MTS was used in North America until the 1980s, despite AT&T’s introduction of the aptly-named Improves Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS) in 1965. The new service introduced user dialing, removed the need for operator forwarding and used additional radio channels which increased the number of possible subscribers and calls, as well as area coverage. IMTS was still mobile telephony in its infancy however, and was limited to 40,000 subscribers nationwide. In New York city, 2,000 customers shared 12 radio channels which on average took 30 minutes to place a call.
Radio Common Carriers (RCCs) were another solution designed to compete with AT&T’s MTS and IMTS systems. Not only were the units huge (see above) but standards varied widely. Some phones were half-duplex “push to talk”, some were full-duplex much like a wired telephone. Some lucky customers even carried around briefcase-sized full duplex devices, though RCC units were mainly limited to cars.
In 1960 the world’s first fully automated mobile telephone was introduced in Sweden. The system allowed for automated connection from a rotary handset (that’s the circular dialing knob to me and you) mounted within a car, but required an operator to forward calls. The system was known as Mobile Telephone system A (MTA) and was replaced by MTB two years later.
In this interim period there were several other solutions including the arrival of Motorola on the scene in 1959 and Bulgarian and Russian (then USSR) solutions sprouted up too. It wasn’t until 1971 when the ARP network was introduced to Finland that the world’s first successful commercial network was launched. The system relied on cars, began as half-duplex but soon evolved and had over 35,000 subscribers by 1986.
Dr Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive made the first phone call from a handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973. This ushered in a new dawn of communication.
Analog Cellular Networks or “1G”
The first generation of cellular networks paved the way to the networks we know and use today. Use of multiple cell tower sites, each connected through a network, allowed users to travel and even switch cell towers during a call. It was a revolution built on existing, analog technology with the first being built in Chicago in 1977.
Known as the Analong Mobile Phone System (AMPS), it was built by AT&T and it took the FCC 11 years to approve AT&T’s initial proposal in 1971 before they were assigned the 824-894MHz range on which to operate AMPS.
Hot on the heels of the western researchers were Japanese telecommunications company NTT who built their own network in 1979. Five years later it was the first 1G network to cover an entire country. Then came the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) network in 1981. Operating in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, it was the first to feature international roaming
Digital Cellular Networks or “2G”
As technological advancement picked up the pace, so did mobile phones. The 1990s saw the arrival of two new, digital technologies – the European GSM standard and the North American CDMA standard. Demand grew and more and more cell tower sites were built. In addition to technological improvements in batteries and internal components, this allowed for much smaller mobile devices.
Another advancement made possible by 2G was the introduction of SMS messaging, with the first computer generated SMS sent in 1992 in the UK. A year later in Finland, the first person-to-person SMS was delivered using GSM technology. As popularity grew, pre-paid mobile phones and plans emerged in the late 1990s which further popularized SMS amongst all ages.
The very first download services were also introduced using 2G technology and enabled users to download ringtones. Mobile phones also saw use as another method of payment for services like car parking in Finland and vending machines.
Mobile Broadband or “3G”
NTT DoCoMo pioneered the first mobile Internet service in Japan in 1999 on existing 2G technologies, but it was soon replaced with their launch of the world’s first 3G network in October 2001. Many countries followed suit in the following years including South Korea, the US and the first European 3G networks which sprang up in the UK and Italy in 2003.
While 3G was still being developed a number of “2.5G” services appeared in an attempt to bring older technologies up to speed. Unfortunately speed was the lacking factor, and while technologies like GPRS and EDGE provided improvements over standard 2G, they did not match the speed of existing 3G technologies.
3G transformed the mobile phone industry and enabled widespread mobile Internet and the transmission services like TV and Radio for the very first time. Handset manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon and smartphone use took off. By around 2005 3G had evolved a step further, leading many to coin the terms “3.5G” “turbo 3G” and “3G+” in reference to HSPDA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), HSPA and HSPA+.
Native IP or “4G”
While no official standards exist for 4G, a few technologies have laid claim to the title. The first was WiMAX, offered by Sprint in the US but perhaps the most successful has been LTE, which is popular also in North America but non-existent in some territories such as Australia. 4G marks the switch to native IP networks, bringing mobile Internet more in-line with wired home Internet connections.
Speed is of course the big advantage, with potential advancements of ten times over 3G rates. The fourth generation of mobile communication is still evolving, and we’re bound to see new standards, speed increases and coverage benefits in the next few years. For a better understanding of 3G and 4G mobile Internet, check out this article.
5G in R&D phase (yet to be Launched)
- Radio propagation and channel models for millimeter-wave wireless communication may be found in IEEE papers: Millimeter Wave Mobile Communications for 5G Cellular: It Will Work!" in IEEE Access, Vol. 1, May 2013; "Broadband Millimeter-Wave Propagation Measurements and Models Using Adaptive-Beam Antennas for Outdoor Urban Cellular Communications, in IEEE Trans. Antennas and Propagation, April 2013, and many other peer-reviewed conference and journal papers. Pearson/Prentice Hall has released a comprehensive text on "Millimeter Wave Wireless Communications," authored by Ted Rappaport, R. W Heath, Jr., Robert Daniels, and James Murdock. This text, over 700 pages in length, covers technical areas regarding potential 5G technologies, including standards for major global 60 GHz wireless local-area networks (WLAN) and personal local-area networks (WPAN).
- Massive Dense Networks also known as Massive Distributed MIMO providing green flexible small cells 5G Green Dense Small Cells. This is a transmission point equipped with a very large number of antennas that simultaneously serve multiple users. With massive MIMO multiple messages for several terminals can be transmitted on the same time-frequency resource, maximizing beamforming gain while minimizing interference.[27][28][29][30]
- Proactive content caching at the edge: While network densification (i.e., adding more cells) is one way to achieve higher capacity and coverage, it becomes evident that the cost of this operation might not be sustainable as the dense deployment of base stations also requires high-speed expensive backhauls. In this regard, assuming that the backhaul is capacity-limited, caching users' contents at the edge of the network (namely at the base stations and user terminals) holds as a solution to offload the backhaul and reduce the access delays to the contents.[31][32] In any case, caching contents at the edge aim to solve the problem of reducing the end-to-end delay, which is one of the requirements of 5G. The upcoming special issue of IEEE Communications Magazine aims to argue massive content delivery techniques in cache-enabled 5G wireless networks.[33]
- Advanced interference and mobility management, achieved with the cooperation of different transmission points with overlapped coverage, and encompassing the option of a flexible use of resources for uplink and downlink transmission in each cell, the option of direct device-to-device transmission and advanced interference cancellation techniques.[34][35][36]
- Efficient support of machine-type devices to enable the Internet of Things with potentially higher numbers of connected devices, as well as novel applications, such as mission-critical control or traffic safety, requiring reduced latency and enhanced reliability.[citation needed]
- Use of millimeter-wave frequencies (e.g. up to 90 GHz) for wireless backhaul and/or access (IEEE rather than ITU generations)[citation needed]
- Pervasive networks providing Internet of things, wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous computing: The user can be connected simultaneously to several wireless access technologies and can move seamlessly between them (See Media independent handover or vertical handover, IEEE 802.21, also expected to be provided by future 4G releases. See also multihoming.). These access technologies can be 2.5G, 3G, 4G, or 5G mobile networks, Wi-Fi, WPAN, or any other future access technology. In 5G, the concept may be further developed into multiple concurrent data-transfer paths.[37]
- Multiple-hop networks: A major issue in systems beyond 4G is to make the high bit rates available in a larger portion of the cell, especially to users in an exposed position in between several base stations. In current research, this issue is addressed by cellular repeaters and macro-diversity techniques, also known as group cooperative relay, where users also could be potential cooperative nodes, thanks to the use of direct device-to-device (D2D) communication.[13]
- Wireless network virtualization: Virtualization will be extended to 5G mobile wireless networks. With wireless network virtualization, network infrastructure can be decoupled from the services that it provides, where differentiated services can coexist on the same infrastructure, maximizing its utilization. Consequently, multiple wireless virtual networks operated by different service providers (SPs) can dynamically share the physical substrate wireless networks operated by mobile network operators (MNOs). Since wireless network virtualization enables the sharing of infrastructure and radio spectrum resources, the capital expenses (CapEx) and operation expenses (OpEx) of wireless (radio) access networks (RANs), as well as core networks (CNs), can be reduced significantly. Moreover, mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) who may provide some specific telecom services (e.g., VoIP, video call, over-the-top services) can help MNOs attract more users, while MNOs can produce more revenue by leasing the isolated virtualized networks to them and evaluating some new services.[38]
- Cognitive radio technology, also known as smart radio. This allows different radio technologies to share the same spectrum efficiently by adaptively finding unused spectrum and adapting the transmission scheme to the requirements of the technologies currently sharing the spectrum. This dynamic radio resource management is achieved in a distributed fashion and relies on software-defined radio.[39][40] See also the IEEE 802.22 standard for Wireless Regional Area Networks.
- Dynamic Adhoc Wireless Networks (DAWN),[3] essentially identical to Mobile ad hoc network (MANET), Wireless mesh network (WMN) or wireless grids, combined with smart antennas, cooperative diversity and flexible modulation.
- Vandermonde-subspace frequency division multiplexing (VFDM): a modulation scheme to allow the co-existence of macro cells and cognitive radio small cells in a two-tiered LTE/4G network.[41]
- IPv6, where a visiting care-of mobile IP address is assigned according to location and connected network.[37]
- Wearable devices with AI capabilities.[3] such as smartwatches and optical head-mounted displays for augmented reality
- One unified global standard.
- Real wireless world with no more limitation with access and zone issues.
- User centric (or cell phone developer initiated) network concept instead of operator-initiated (as in 1G) or system developer initiated (as in 2G, 3G and 4G) standards
- Li-Fi (a portmanteau of light and Wi-Fi) is a massive MIMO visible light communication network to advance 5G. Li-Fi uses light-emitting diodes to transmit data, rather than radio waves like Wi-Fi.
- Worldwide wireless web (WWWW), i.e. comprehensive wireless-based web applications that include full multimedia capability beyond 4G speeds.
- Conclusion
Briefly tapping such a rich history of mobile phones is difficult, but I think we’ve covered the major events, devices and happenings in the world of cellular communication. Many will of course remember these developments, but for those that don’t, spare a thought for the pioneers of analog, the original digital voice-only networks and the pitiful Internet speeds that 2G networks offered the next time you’re Tweeting and Facebooking on your iPhone.
