The historical journey from landlines to cellphones
1873: British physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) published the theory of electromagnetism & how electricity can make magnetism and vice-versa.1876: Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) developed the first telephone(though there is some dispute about whether he was actually the original inventor or not).
Later, Bell developed it & called a "photophone" that send and receive phone calls using light beams. Since it was conceived as a wireless phone, it was really a distant ancestor of the modern mobile phone.
1888: German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894) made the first electromagnetic radio waves.
1894: British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) sent the first message using radio waves in Oxford.
1899: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) sent radio waves across the English Channel. By 1901. Marconi had sent radio waves across the Atlantic, from Cornwall in England to Newfoundland. Marconi is remembered as the father of radio, but pioneers such as Hertz and Lodge were no less important.
1906: American engineer Reginald Fessenden (1866–1932) became the first person to transmit the human voice using radio waves. He sent a message 11 miles from a transmitter at Brant Rock, Massachusetts to ships with radio receivers in the Atlantic Ocean.
1920s: Emergency services began to experiment with cumbersome radio telephones.
1940s: Mobile radio telephones started to become popular with emergency services and taxis.
1946: AT&T and Southwestern Bell introduced their Mobile Telephone System (MTS) for sending radio calls between vehicles.
1960s: Bell Laboratories (Bell Labs) developed Metroliner mobile cell phones on trains.
1973: Martin Cooper (1928–) of Motorola made the first cell phone call using his 28-lb prototype DynaTAC phone.
1975: Cooper and his colleagues were granted a patent for their radio telephone system. Their original design is shown in the artwork you can see here.
1978: Analog Mobile Phone System (AMPS) was introduced in Chicago by Illinois Bell and AT&T.
1982: European telephone companies agreed a worldwide standard for how cell phones will operate, which was named Groupe Speciale Mobile and later Global System for Mobile (GSM) telecommunications.
1984: Motorola DynaTAC became the world's first commercial handheld cellphone.
1995: GSM and a similar system called PCS (Personal Communications Services) were adopted in the United States.
2001: GSM had captured over 70 percent of the world cellphone market.
2000s: Third-generation (3G and 3.5G) cellphones were launched, featuring faster networks, Internet access, music downloads, and many more advanced features based on digital technology.
2007: Apple's iPhone revolutionized the world of cellphones, packing what is effectively a touch-controlled miniature computer into a gadget in the same sense as a conventional cellular phone.
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