Who made the first phone call. Who Invented the Cell Phone? Who Invented the Touch Phone

On February 14, 1876, Scottish-American Alexander Graham Bell filed an application with the US Patent Office for an apparatus he invented, which he called the telephone. Just two hours later, another American named Gray made a similar claim.

This happens to inventors to this day, although very infrequently. Bell's luck also consisted in the fact that an accident helped him to make an outstanding invention. However, to a much greater extent, the telephone owes its appearance to the enormous work, perseverance and knowledge of this person.

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh on March 3, 1847 into a family of philologists. At the age of 14, he moved to London to live with his grandfather, under whose guidance he studied literature and oratory. And three years later he began an independent life, teaching music and oratory at the Weston House Academy. In the spring of 1871, the family moved to Boston, where Bell taught at a school for the deaf and dumb using a "visible speech system" invented by his grandfather.
At that time, the Western Union company was looking for a way to transmit several telegrams simultaneously over one pair of wires in order to eliminate the need for laying additional telegraph lines. The company announced a large cash prize to an inventor who would come up with a similar method.

Bell began to work on this problem, using his knowledge of the laws of acoustics. Bell was going to transmit seven telegrams at the same time, according to the number of musical notes - a tribute to the music he had loved since childhood. In the work on the "musical telegraph" Bell was assisted by a young resident of Boston, Thomas Watson. Watson admired Bell.

“Once, when I was working, a tall, slender, mobile man with a pale face, black sideburns and a high sloping forehead rushed up to my workbench, holding in his hands some part of the apparatus that was not made the way he wanted. He was the first educated person with whom I became intimately acquainted, and much about him delighted me.
Thomas Watson
about Graham Bell

And not only him. Bell's horizons were unusually broad, which was recognized by many of his contemporaries. A versatile education was combined in him with a liveliness of imagination, and this allowed him to easily combine in his experiments such different areas of science and art - acoustics, music, electrical engineering and mechanics.

Since, nevertheless, Bell was not an electrician, he consulted another famous Bostonian, scientist D. Henry, whose name is the unit of inductance. After examining the first model of the telegraph in Bell's laboratory, Henry exclaimed: "Do not quit what you started under any pretext!" Without leaving work on the "musical telegraph", Bell at the same time began to build a certain apparatus, through which he hoped to make the sounds of speech immediately and directly visible to the deaf-mutes, without any written notation. To do this, he worked for almost a year at the Massachusetts Otolaryngological Hospital, setting up various experiments to study human hearing.

The main part of the apparatus was to be a membrane, fixed on the latter, a needle recorded on the surface of a rotating drum curves corresponding to various sounds, syllables and words. Reflecting on the action of the membrane, Bell came up with the idea of ​​another device, with the help of which, as he wrote, "it will become possible to transmit various sounds, if only it will be possible to cause fluctuations in the intensity of the electric current, corresponding to those fluctuations in the density of air that this sound produces." Bell gave the sonorous name “telephone” to this device, which does not yet exist. So the work on the private task of helping the deaf and dumb led to the idea of ​​the possibility of creating a device that turned out to be necessary for all mankind and, undoubtedly, influenced the further course of history.

Working on the "musical telegraph", Bell and Watson worked in different rooms, where the transmitting and receiving devices were installed. The tuning forks were steel plates of different lengths, rigidly fixed at one end and closing the electrical circuit at the other.
Once Watson had to release the end of the record, which was stuck in the contact gap and in the process touched other records. Those, naturally, rattled. Writer Mitchell Wilson describes the subsequent events as follows: “Although the experimenters believed that the line was not working, Bell's delicate hearing caught a faint rattle in the receiving device. He immediately guessed what had happened, and rushed headlong into the room to Watson. “What were you doing now? he shouted. "Don't change anything!" Watson began to explain what was the matter, but Bell interrupted him excitedly, saying that they had now discovered what they had been looking for all along. The stuck plate acted like a primitive diaphragm. In all of Bell and Watson's previous experiments, the free end simply closed and opened the electrical circuit. Now, the sound vibrations of the plate induced electromagnetic oscillations in a magnet located next to the plate. This was the difference between the telephone and all other pre-existing telegraph devices.

The operation of the telephone requires a continuous electric current, the strength of which would vary in exact accordance with the vibrations of sound waves in the air. The invention of the telephone occurred at the time of the highest flowering of the electric telegraph and was completely unexpected. At that time in the United States, the Morse-founded Magnetic Telegraph Company was completing a line from the Mississippi to the East Coast. In Russia, Boris Jacobi created more and more advanced devices, overtaking all competitors in reliability and transmission speed. The telegraph corresponded to the needs of its era so much that other means of electrical communication were, it seems, not needed at all.

The world's first telephone, assembled by Watson, had a sound membrane made of leather. Its center was connected with the moving armature of the electromagnet. Sound vibrations were amplified by the horn, concentrating on the membrane fixed in its smallest section.

Bell's breadth of outlook played no less a role in the invention of the telephone than his intuition. Knowledge in the field of acoustics and electrical engineering, combined with the experience of an experimenter, led a teacher at a school for deaf children to an invention that allowed millions of people to hear each other across continents and oceans.

Meanwhile, telephony as the principle of transmitting information by voice over long distances was known even before the new era. The Persian king Cyrus (VI century BC) had 30,000 people in the service for this purpose, called "royal ears". Settled on the tops of hills and watchtowers within earshot of each other, they transmitted messages intended for the king and his orders. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC) testifies that in a day the news was transmitted by such a telephone over a distance of a thirty-day transition. Julius Caesar mentions that the Gauls had a similar communication system. Indicates even the speed of transmission of the message - 100 kilometers per hour.

In 1876, Bell demonstrated his apparatus at the Philadelphia World's Fair. Within the walls of the exhibition pavilion, for the first time, the word telephone sounded - this is how the inventor introduced his “talking telegraph”. To the amazement of the jury, the monologue of the Prince of Denmark “To be or not to be?” was heard from the mouthpiece of this contraption, performed at the same time, but in a different room, by the inventor himself, Mr. Bell.

History answered this question with an unquestioning “to be”. Bell's invention became a sensation at the Philadelphia Exposition. And this is despite the fact that the first telephone set worked with monstrous sound distortions, it was possible to talk with it no further than at a distance of 250 meters, because it operated even without batteries, by the force of electromagnetic induction alone, its receiving and transmitting devices were the same primitive.

Having organized the Bell Telephone Society, the inventor began hard work to improve his brainchild, and a year later he patented a new membrane and armature for the telephone. Then I used Yuza's carbon microphone and battery power to increase the transmission distance. In this form, the phone has successfully existed for more than a hundred years.
Many other inventors were engaged in improving telephone devices, and by 1900 more than 3,000 patents had been issued in this area. Of these, one can note a microphone designed by the Russian engineer M. Makhalsky (1878), as well as the first automatic station for 10,000 numbers by S. M. Apostolov (1894). But then, after the Philadelphia exhibition, the history of the phone was just beginning. Ahead was a fierce struggle with competitors. Bell was also expected to compete with another famous inventor - Thomas Edison.

Bell's patent turned out to be one of the most profitable ever issued in the US, so for the next decades he was the target of attacks by almost every major electrical and telegraph company in America. However, its commercial significance was not immediately understood by contemporaries. Almost immediately after receiving the patent, Bell offered Western Union to buy it for $100,000, hoping that the proceeds would enable him to pay off his debts. But his proposal met with no response.

Bell demonstrated his phone in front of an audience in Salem, and in Boston, and in New York. The first broadcasts consisted mainly of playing musical instruments and singing popular arias. Newspapers wrote about the inventor with respect, but his activities almost did not bring money.

On June 11, 1877, Bell and Mabel Hubbard were married at the home of the bride's parents, and the young couple sailed for England. This trip played a huge role in the history of the phone. In England, Bell successfully continued the demonstrations, which attracted a large number of the public. Finally, a "delightful telephone performance" was given to the Queen herself and her family. Titled persons sang, recited and talked to each other over the wires, interrupting themselves with questions about whether they could be heard well. The queen was pleased.

The newspapers were so hyped about the success of the telephone in England that Western Union had to change its mind about the invention. The company's president, Orton, reasoned that if some teacher for the deaf had invented the electric telephone, experts like Edison and Gray could make a better one. And in early 1879, Western Union created the American Spiking Telephone Company, which took up the production of telephones, ignoring Bell's patent law.

Bell's supporters, having taken loans, created the New England Telephone Company in response and rushed into battle. The result of the struggle, however, was the creation at the end of 1879 of the combined "Bell Company". In December of that year, the share price rose to $995. Bell became an extremely wealthy man. Wealth was accompanied by fame and worldwide fame. France awarded him the Volta Prize, established by Napoleon, in the amount of 50 thousand francs (before Bell, this award was issued only once), and made him a Knight of the Legion of Honor. In 1885 he took American citizenship.

In one of his letters to his companions, Bell, for the first time in history, and at the same time, outlined in great detail a plan for creating a telephone network based on a central switch in a large city. In the letter, he insisted that for advertising purposes it would be desirable to install free telephone sets in the central shops of the city.

On a rainy morning on August 4, 1922, all telephones in the United States and Canada were turned off for a minute. America buried Alexander Graham Bell. 13 million telephone sets of all kinds and designs fell silent in honor of the great inventor.

Ordinary Story: Telephone

Journalist Seth Schulman claims that the Englishman Bell was not the inventor of the telephone.

The history of patenting the phone is amazing in its own way. It is known that Alexander Bell and Elisha Gray appeared on the same day, February 14, 1876, at the US Patent Office in Washington. Bell has applied for a "Telegraphic Device By Which Human Speech Can Be Transmitted". Two hours later Elisha Grey, a well-known electrical engineer from Chicago, arrived. His application was called "Device for transmitting and receiving vocal sounds by telegraph".

And so, on March 7, 1876, Bell received copyright certificate number 174465 for an "improved telegraph model" consisting of a wooden stand, an auditory tube, an acid tank (batteries) and copper wires. In other words - a phone, the first working model of which, for its characteristic shape, the creator dubbed the "gallows". Gray was denied a patent.

Shulman claims that Gray was the "father" of the phone. The journalist refers to Bell's laboratory diary, which has recently become available to a wide range of researchers. Prior to this, access to Bell's diary was prohibited at the request of his heirs. Examining the diary entries, Schulman established that the idea for the invention appeared in Bell's notes only 12 days before the application for the device was sent. Previously, he unsuccessfully tried to implement a different principle for transmitting sounds over wires.

Moreover, Bell's application contains a drawing of a man with a telephone - an almost exact copy also appeared in the package of documents for the invention, transferred by Gray to the Patent Office. Schulman also argues that subjective evidence that Bell borrowed the idea for the telephone from Gray is provided by the memoirs of the inventors' contemporaries. In them, Bell refused to testify at the trial, during which Gray tried to prove his right to the invention.

At the same time, the author of the book notes, even if the very idea of ​​the phone did not belong to Bell, it was he who created the first working model of the device. Gray, if we assume that it was he who invented the principle of the telephone, did not advance further than theoretical research.

I must say that the primacy in the invention of the telephone was disputed by many, including the Italians Manzetti and Maicci. Already in 1878, lawsuits began in the United States, where Bell's primacy was disputed. Almost three dozen people opposed him, attributing to themselves the invention of the main parts of the telephone. The court initially dismissed six claims. The claims of a number of scientists were taken into separate court proceedings, divided into 11 points, each of which was subject to an independent decision. The court found Bell on eight counts, Edison on two counts, and McDonought on one count. Gray didn't score a single point.

Bell's brainchild remained in the shadows until he decided to present the "newborn" in June 1876 at an industrial exhibition in Philadelphia. At first, all visitors indifferently passed by his apparatus. And just before the closing of the exhibition, a distinguished guest, Emperor of Brazil Pedro II, stopped at the stand with a telephone. Interested in a technical novelty, he took the earpiece and put it to his ear. And he was so amazed to hear a human voice in it that he exclaimed: "My God! This thing is talking!" And in an instant, Bell's invention became one of the sensations of the exhibition.

It is curious that for the last 40 years of his life, Bell flatly refused to install his creation at home, each time arguing that "at work this is a useful device, but at home it can turn your family life into hell."

My phone rang. Who is speaking? Elephant! The telephone is an invention that changed the world. Since all our modern activities are so tied to this thing, we decided to trace the history of its development, and at the same time understand how it works.

Do you know someone who doesn't have a phone? Perhaps it is perhaps very old grandparents. Well, or guys from the Tumba-Yumba tribe. Although they probably already have. The telephone appeared a century and a half ago, and here is the result: each person calls the phone about 1,500 times a year!

Development of telephony

The first telephones had a range of only 500 meters, they did not have a call, and the call had to be made using a whistle. After the introduction of a carbon microphone and an induction coil into the phone, the range of the device has increased significantly.

The first telephone exchanges could not connect subscribers directly. In order to “call”, you had to pick up the phone and start turning the lever. After connecting with the telephone operator, she was told the subscriber's number, she stuck the plug into the socket, and only after that the conversation began.

Calling directly has become possible since the 20s of the last century, although an automatic switchboard that can replace the work of telephone operators was proposed back in 1887 by the Russian scientist K.A. Mostitsky.

Now we are used to 7-digit numbers and international dialing codes. And the first phone numbers consisted of only 2-3 digits.

In 1927 it was already possible to call from New York to London. Telephone networks began to actively cover the globe.

By the way, call us anytime! For our readers there is now a 10% discount on

The principle of operation of the phone "on the fingers"

Why on fingers? Because before you deal with something complicated (for example, the principle of operation of a modern mobile phone), you always need to deal with the simplest things, from which everything started.

Phone signals are electric. Human speech is a sound signal. The phone converts sound signals into electrical signals and vice versa.

We speak into a microphone, the membrane vibrates, its vibrations in a magnetic field create a current in the coil, which is transmitted through the wire to the interlocutor. At the other end, the reverse process occurs: the current flows in the moving coil of the speaker, because of this, the membrane vibrates and “sways” the air. As a result, we hear sound.

Now phones can be divided into:

• conventional landlines;
• radiotelephones;
• Cell Phones;
• satellite phones;
• telephones operating in IP-telephony.

The advent of modern telephones, mobile communications

The significance of the invention of the mobile phone was also revolutionary. And the first mobile phones appeared in 1976. They were huge and the cost was also huge. In the 1980s, you could already buy a cell phone in America for $3,500. For comparison: a new Ford Mustang cost 6500.

It is believed that it was invented in the USA, but there is a version that the first mobile prototype was developed in the USSR in 1973. Like many interesting developments, the Soviet mobile phone remained unknown to the world.

In the CIS countries, mobile phones became widespread in the 90s of the 20th century.

Prospects for the development of phones

Scientists, futurists and social scientists believe that in the future, smartphones are likely to replace such separate devices as a computer, laptop and camera. The capabilities and power of phones will allow you to simply connect a monitor and keyboard to them, turning your smartphone into a full-fledged personal PC.

Even now, a modern phone is a real research station that collects a huge amount of data. In the future, the quantity and quality of data will increase. The collected information can be used for a variety of studies: from the behavior of groups of people to earthquake prediction and weather forecasting. Bank cards will also become a thing of the past. Already, there is a technology that allows you to pay with your smartphone, using it instead of a card.

But that's all in the future. So far, no matter how smart a smartphone is, it will not be able to write a term paper or test for you. A special student service can help with this, providing services to professionals in all areas: from agronomy and accounting to electronics and nuclear physics.

Modern mobile phones are significantly different from what was used 20 or even 10 years ago. Photo evidence is attached.

World's first mobile phone: Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (1983)

Today, Motorola is not a leader in the mobile industry, but it is the company that launched the world's first mobile phone. It turned out to be the DynaTAC 8000X model. The prototype of the device was shown in 1973, but commercial sales began only in 1983. The powerful DynaTAC weighed almost a kilogram, worked for an hour on a single battery charge and could store up to 30 phone numbers.

First car phone: Nokia Mobira Senator (1982)

In the early 1980s, the Nokia Mobira Senator became widely known. It was released in 1982 and was the first of its kind - it was designed for use in a car, while weighing about 10 kilograms.

Gorbachev spoke on it: Nokia Mobira Cityman 900 (1987)

In 1987, Nokia introduced the Mobira Cityman 900, the first device for NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephony) networks. The device became easily recognizable due to the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev used it to call from Helsinki to Moscow, and photographers did not ignore this. Nokia Mobira Cityman 900 weighed approximately 800 grams. The price was high - in terms of current money, its purchase would cost the Americans 6,635 dollars, and the Russians - 202,482 rubles.

First GSM phone: Nokia 101 (1992)

The Nokia phone, with the modest index 101, was the first commercially available device capable of operating on GSM networks. A monoblock with a monochrome screen had a retractable antenna and a book with 99 numbers. Unfortunately, it did not yet contain the well-known Nokia tune ringtone, as the composition appeared in the next model, released in 1994.

Touchscreen: IBM Simon Personal Communicator (1993)

One of the first attempts to create a communicator was a joint development of IBM and Bellsouth. The IBM Simon Personal Communicator phone was stripped of the keyboard, offering instead a touch screen with a stylus. For $899, buyers got a device that could make calls, fax, and store notes.

First flip phone: Motorola StarTAC (1996)

In 1996, Motorola confirmed its title of innovator by introducing the first flip phone, the StarTAC. The device was considered stylish and fashionable, it was compact not only for that time, but also in comparison with modern smartphones.

First smartphone: Nokia 9000 Communicator (1996)

The weight of the Nokia 9000 Communicator (397 grams) did not prevent the phone from becoming popular. The first smartphone was equipped with 8 MB of memory and monochrome screens. When opened to the user's gaze, a QWERTY keyboard was opened, making it easier to work with text.

Replacement panels: Nokia 5110 (1998)

In the late 1990s, companies realized that mobile phones were viewed by consumers not only as a means of communication, but also as accessories. In 1998, Nokia released the 5110, which supported interchangeable panels. The phone has become popular also thanks to the excellent assembly, good battery life. It featured the famous Snake game.

First camera phone: Sharp J-SH04 (2000)

Sharp J-SH04 was released in Japan in 2000. This is the world's first camera phone. The resolution of the camera today seems ridiculous - 0.1 megapixels, but then the J-SH04 seemed to be something incredible. After all, the phone could be used as a bad camera, but still.

Mail is Essential: RIM BlackBerry 5810 (2002)

RIM introduced its first BlackBerry in 2002. Prior to this, the Canadian manufacturer was engaged in the production of organizers. The main drawback of the BlackBerry 5810 was the lack of a microphone and speakers - a headset was required to talk on it.

PDA meets phone: Palm Treo 600 (2003)

Palm has long been considered the main manufacturer of PDAs (personal pocket computers) and in 2003 released the hugely successful Treo 600 model. Communicator with a QWERTY keyboard, color screen, 5-way navigation key was based on Palm OS 5.

Gaming phone: Nokia N-Gage (2003)

Nokia has made several attempts to capture the minds of mobile gamers and not all of them have been successful. The first truly gaming phone is called the Nokia N-Gage. It is similar in design to a portable console and was positioned as an alternative to the Nintendo Game Boy. On the front side there are gaming control keys, which few people found comfortable. The games themselves were recorded on MMC memory cards. The microphone and speaker in the N-Gage are located at the end, so all users looked like cheburashkas during conversations. There were a lot of minuses and the project failed.

O2 XDA II (2004)

O2, like Palm, was heavily involved in the PDA. In 2004, the XDA II model appeared, offering users a sliding QWERTY keyboard, office applications. The price then bit - 1,390 US dollars.

Blade thin: Motorola RAZR V3 (2004)

Motorola RAZR V3 is considered to be the best-selling clamshell. The model attracted attention with a slim and stylish design. The creators drew inspiration from the "old man" StarTAC and as a result released a device dressed in a case with aluminum inserts, with a VGA camera (0.3 MP), Bluetooth, GSM. After the light saw the improved RAZR V3x, RAZR V3i and RAZR V3xx with a better camera, 3G, microSD.

First phone with iTunes: Motorola ROKR E1 (2005)

In 2005, few could have imagined that Apple, which specializes in computers and music players, would venture into the mobile industry (and introduce the popular iPhone). The company entered into an agreement with Motorola, and as a result, the ROKR E1 was created - a device with support for the iTunes music library. The expectations of buyers were not justified - few people liked the candy bar with a Motorola design, slow USB 1.1 interface, an outdated 0.3-megapixel camera and a song storage limit (100 pieces).

Motorola MOTOFONE F3 (2007)

The Motorola MOTOFONE F3 retailed for just $60. One of the most affordable devices on the market offered a display made using the technology of "electronic paper" (EPD, Electronic Paper Display). The advantages include low weight, small thickness.

Easy Finger Control: Apple iPhone (2007)

The first version of the Apple iPhone was originally released in the US in 2007. A touch phone with a 2-megapixel camera, a 3.5-inch touch screen, and a convenient finger-oriented interface supported only second-generation networks. The iPhone did not work with MMS and could not record video. In 2008, the iPhone 3G was released, and in 2009, the iPhone 3GS. The concept has not changed in three years - programs and a user-friendly interface are at the center.

Dr. Martin Cooper with his first mobile phone 1973 Photo 2007

Usually, the history of the creation of a mobile phone is told something like this.

On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, head of Motorola's mobile communications division, was walking through midtown Manhattan and decided to call on his cell phone. The mobile phone was called Dyna-TAC and looked like a brick that weighed over a kilogram and worked in talk mode for only half an hour.

Prior to this, the son of the founder of Motorola, Robert Gelvin, who in those days served as the executive director of this company, allocated $ 15 million and gave his subordinates a period of 10 years to create a device that the user can carry with him. The first working sample appeared in just a couple of months. The success of Martin Cooper, who came to the company in 1954 as an ordinary engineer, was facilitated by the fact that since 1967 he has been developing portable radios. It was they who led to the idea of ​​a mobile phone.

It is believed that until this moment there were no other mobile telephones that a person can carry with him like a watch or a notebook. There were walkie-talkies, there were "mobile" phones that could be used in a car or train, but there was no such thing as just walking down the street.

Moreover, until the early 1960s, many companies refused to conduct research into the creation of cellular communications at all, because they came to the conclusion that, in principle, it was impossible to create a compact cellular telephone. And none of the specialists of these companies paid attention to the fact that on the other side of the "Iron Curtain" in popular science magazines, photographs began to appear, which depicted ... a man talking on a mobile phone. (For those who doubt, the numbers of the magazines where the pictures are published will be given, so that everyone can make sure that this is not a graphic editor).

Hoax? Joke? Propaganda? An attempt to misinform Western electronics manufacturers (this industry was known to be of strategic military importance)? Maybe it's just an ordinary walkie-talkie? However, further searches led to a completely unexpected conclusion - Martin Cooper was not the first person in history to call on a mobile phone. And not even second.

Engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich demonstrates the capabilities of a mobile phone. "Science and Life", 10, 1958.

The man in the picture from the Science and Life magazine was named Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich, and it was he who turned out to be the person who made the call on a mobile phone 15 years earlier than Cooper. But before we talk about it, remember that the basic principles of mobile communications have a very, very long history.

Actually, attempts to give the phone mobility appeared soon after the appearance. Field telephones were created with coils for quick laying of the line, attempts were made to quickly provide communication from the car, throwing wires on a line running along the highway or connecting to a socket on a pole. Of all this, only field phones have found relatively widespread use (at one of the mosaics of the Kievskaya metro station in Moscow, modern passengers sometimes mistake a field phone for a mobile phone and a laptop).

It became possible to provide genuine mobility of telephone communication only after the advent of radio communications in the VHF band. By the 1930s, transmitters appeared that a person could easily carry on his back or hold in his hands - in particular, they were used by the American radio company NBC for operational reporting from the scene. However, connections with automatic telephone exchanges have not yet been provided by such means of communication.

Portable VHF transmitter. Radio Front, 16, 1936

During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet scientist and inventor Georgy Ilyich Babat in besieged Leningrad proposed the so-called "monophone" - an automatic radiotelephone operating in the centimeter range of 1000-2000 MHz (now the frequencies 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 Hz are used for the GSM standard), number which is encoded in the phone itself, is equipped with an alphabetic keyboard and also has the functions of a voice recorder and an answering machine. “It weighs no more than a Leica film apparatus,” wrote G. Babat in his article “Monofon” in the Tekhnika-Molodezhi magazine No. 7-8 for 1943: “Wherever the subscriber is - at home, away or at work, in the foyer of the theater, on the podium of the stadium, watching the competition - everywhere he can turn his individual monophone into one of the many endings of the wave network branching. Several subscribers can connect to one ending, and no matter how many there are, they will not interfere with each other. friend". Due to the fact that the principles of cellular communication had not yet been invented by that time, Babat proposed using an extensive network of microwave waveguides to connect mobile phones with a base station.

G. Babat, who proposed the idea of ​​a mobile phone

In December 1947, Bell employees Douglas Ring and Ray Young proposed the principle of hexagonal cells for mobile telephony. This happened just in the midst of active attempts to create a phone with which you can make calls from the car. The first such service was launched in 1946 in St. Louis by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1947 a system with intermediate stations along the highway was launched, allowing calls from a car on the way from New York to Boston. However, due to imperfection and high cost, these systems were not commercially successful. In 1948, another American telephone company in Richmond managed to set up a car radio telephone service with automatic dialing, which was already better. The weight of the equipment of such systems was tens of kilograms and it was placed in the trunk, so an inexperienced person did not have a thought about a pocket version of looking at it.

Domestic automobile radiotelephone. Radio, 1947, No. 5.

Nevertheless, as noted in the same 1946 in the journal "Science and Life", No. 10, domestic engineers G. Shapiro and I. Zakharchenko developed a telephone communication system from a moving car with a city network, the mobile device of which had a capacity of only 1 watt and fit under the instrument panel. Power was from a car battery.

The telephone number assigned to the car was connected to the radio receiver installed at the city telephone exchange. To call a city subscriber, it was necessary to turn on the device in the car, which sent its call signs on the air. They were perceived by the base station at the city PBX and immediately turned on the telephone, which worked like a regular phone. When calling a car, the city subscriber dialed the number, this activated the base station, the signal of which was perceived by the device on the car.

As can be seen from the description, this system was something like a radio tube. In the course of experiments carried out in 1946 in Moscow, a range of over 20 km was achieved, and a conversation with Odessa was carried out with excellent audibility. In the future, the inventors worked to increase the radius of the base station up to 150 km.

It was expected that the telephone system Shapiro and Zakharchenko will be widely used in the work of fire brigades, air defense units, police, emergency medical and technical assistance. However, further information about the development of the system did not appear. It can be assumed that it was considered more expedient for the emergency services to use their departmental communication systems than to use the GTS.

Alfred Gross could have been the creator of the first mobile phone.

In the United States, Alfred Gross was the first to attempt the impossible. Since 1939, he has been fond of creating portable radios, which decades later were called "walkie talkies". In 1949, he created a device based on a portable radio, which he called the "wireless remote telephone." The device could be carried with you, and he gave the owner a signal to answer the phone. It is believed that this was the first simple pager. Gross even implemented it in one of the hospitals in New York, but the telephone companies showed no interest in this novelty, as well as in his other ideas in this direction. So America lost the chance to be the birthplace of the first practical mobile phone.

However, these ideas were developed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USSR. So, one of those who continued to search in the field of mobile communications in our country was Leonid Kupriyanovich. The press of that time reported very little about his personality. It was known that he lived in Moscow, his activities were sparingly characterized by the press as a "radio engineer" or "radio amateur". It is also known that Kupriyanovich could be considered a successful person at that time - in the early 60s he had a car.

The consonance of the names of Kupriyanovich and Cooper is only the initial link in the chain of strange coincidences in the fate of these personalities. Kupriyanovich, like Cooper and Gross, also started with miniature walkie-talkies - he has been making them since the mid-50s, and many of his designs are striking even now - both in their dimensions and in the simplicity and originality of their solutions. The tube radio station he created in 1955 weighed as much as the first transistor walkie talkies of the early 60s.

Pocket radio Kupriyanovich 1955

In 1957, Kupriyanovich demonstrates an even more amazing thing - a walkie-talkie the size of a matchbox and weighing only 50 grams (together with power supplies), which can work without changing the power supply for 50 hours and provides communication at a distance of two kilometers - quite a match for the products of the 21st century, which can be seen on the windows of the current communication salons (picture from the magazine YUT, 3, 1957). As evidenced by the publication in UT, 12, 1957, mercury or manganese batteries were used in this radio station.

At the same time, Kupriyanovich not only managed without microcircuits, which simply did not exist at that time, but also used miniature lamps together with transistors. In 1957 and 1960, the first and second editions of his book for radio amateurs were published, with the promising title "Pocket Radio Stations".

The 1960 edition describes a simple three-transistor radio that can be worn on the arm, much like the famous watch walkie-talkie from Dead Season. The author offered it for tourists and mushroom pickers to repeat, but in life, students showed interest in this design of Kupriyanovich mainly - for tips on exams, which even entered the episode of Gaidai's comedy film "Operation Y"

Handheld radio of Kupriyanovich

And, just like Cooper, pocket walkie-talkies led Kupriyanovich to make such a radiotelephone from which one could call any city telephone, and which one could take with you anywhere. The pessimistic mood of foreign firms could not stop a man who knew how to make walkie-talkies from a matchbox.

In 1957 L.I. Kupriyanovich received a copyright certificate for the "Radiofon" - an automatic radiotelephone with direct dialing. Through an automatic telephone radio station, from this device it was possible to connect with any subscriber of the telephone network within the range of the Radiophone transmitter. By that time, the first operating set of equipment was also ready, demonstrating the principle of operation of the Radiophone, named by the inventor LK-1 (Leonid Kupriyanovich, the first sample).
LK-1, by our standards, was still difficult to call a mobile phone, but it made a great impression on contemporaries. “The telephone set is small in size, its weight does not exceed three kilograms,” wrote Science and Life. “Batteries are placed inside the body of the apparatus; the term of their continuous use is 20-30 hours. LK-1 has 4 special radio tubes, so that the power given off by the antenna is sufficient for short-wave communication in 20-30 km ranges. 2 antennas are placed on the device; on its front panel there are 4 call switches, a microphone (outside of which headphones are connected) and a dialing dial.

Just like in a modern cell phone, Kupriyanovich's device was connected to the city telephone network through a base station (the author called it ATP - automatic telephone radio station), which received signals from mobile phones to a wired network and transmitted from a wired network to mobile phones. 50 years ago, the operating principles of a mobile phone were described simply and figuratively for inexperienced cleaners: “The connection of the ATP with any subscriber occurs, like with a conventional telephone, only we control its operation from a distance.”
For the operation of the mobile phone with the base station, four communication channels were used at four frequencies: two channels were used for transmitting and receiving sound, one for dialing and one for hanging up.

Kupriyanovich's first mobile phone. ("Science and Life, 8, 1957"). On the right is the base station.

The reader may suspect that the LK-1 was a simple radio receiver for a telephone. But it turns out that this is not so. “The question involuntarily arises: will several simultaneously operating LK-1s interfere with each other?” - writes the same "Science and Life". “No, since in this case different tonal frequencies are used for the device, forcing their relays to operate on the ATR (tonal frequencies will be transmitted on the same wave). The frequencies of transmission and reception of sound for each device will be different in order to avoid their mutual influence.

Thus, LK-1 had number coding in the telephone set itself, and not depending on the wired line, which allows it to be considered with good reason as the first mobile phone. True, judging by the description, this coding was very primitive, and the number of subscribers who could work through one ATP turned out to be very limited at first. In addition, in the first demonstrator, the ATP was simply included in a regular telephone in parallel with the existing subscriber point - this made it possible to start experiments without making changes to the city PBX, but made it difficult to simultaneously “go to the city” from several handsets. However, in 1957, LK-1 still existed in only one copy.

Using the first mobile phone was not as convenient as it is now. ("UT, 7, 1957")

Nevertheless, the practical possibility of implementing a wearable mobile phone and organizing such a mobile communication service, at least in the form of departmental switches, has been proven. “The range of the device is ... several tens of kilometers,” writes Leonid Kupriyanovich in a note for the July issue of the magazine “Young Technician” in 1957. "If there is only one receiving device within these limits, this will be enough to talk with any of the inhabitants of the city who has a telephone, and for as many kilometers as you like." “Radiotelephones ... can be used on vehicles, on airplanes and ships. Passengers will be able to call home, work, book a hotel room directly from the aircraft. It will find application among tourists, builders, hunters, etc.”

Comic book in the magazine YUT, 7, 1957: Taunton from the Moscow festival calls his family in Paris on a mobile phone. Now this is no surprise.

In addition, Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would also be able to displace phones built into cars. At the same time, the young inventor immediately used something like a “hands free” headset, i.e. a speakerphone was used instead of an earpiece. In an interview with M. Melgunova, published in the magazine "Behind the wheel", 12, 1957, Kupriyanovich suggested introducing mobile phones in two stages. “In the beginning, while there are few radio telephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near the car enthusiast's home telephone. But later, when there will be thousands of such devices, the ATP will no longer work for one radiotelephone, but for hundreds and thousands. Moreover, all of them will not interfere with each other, since each of them will have its own tone frequency, which makes its relay work. Thus, Kupriyanovich essentially positioned two types of household appliances at once - simple radio tubes, which were easier to put into production, and a mobile phone service, in which one base station serves thousands of subscribers.

Kupriyanovich with LK-1 in the car. To the right of the device is a speakerphone. "Behind the wheel", 12, 1957

One can be surprised how accurately Kupriyanovich more than half a century ago imagined how widely the mobile phone would enter our daily life.
“Taking such a radiophone with you, you are essentially taking an ordinary telephone set, but without wires,” he wrote a couple of years later. “Wherever you are, you can always be found by phone, you just need to dial the known number of your radiophone from any city phone (even from a pay phone). The phone rings in your pocket and you start a conversation. If necessary, you can dial any city telephone number directly from a tram, trolleybus, bus, call an ambulance, fire or emergency vehicle, contact the house ... "
It is hard to believe that these words were written by a person who has not been in the 21st century. However, for Kupriyanovich there was no need to travel to the future. He built it.

Block diagram of a simplified version of LK-1

In 1958, at the request of radio amateurs, Kupryanovich published in the February issue of the magazine "Young Technician" a simplified design of the device, the ATR of which can work with only one radio tube and does not have the function of long-distance calls.

Schematic diagram of a simplified version of LK-1

differential transformer circuit

Using such a mobile phone was somewhat more difficult than modern ones. Before calling the subscriber, it was necessary, in addition to the receiver, to turn on the transmitter on the “tube”. Hearing a long telephone beep in the earpiece and making the appropriate switches, one could proceed to dialing. But all the same, it was more convenient than on the radio stations of that time, since it was not necessary to switch from reception to transmission and end each phrase with the word “Reception!”. At the end of the conversation, the load transmitter turned itself off to save batteries.

Publishing a description in a youth magazine, Kupriyanovich was not afraid of competition. By this time, he had already prepared a new model of the apparatus, which at that time can be considered revolutionary.

LK-1 and base station. Yut, 2, 1958

The mobile phone model of 1958, together with the power supply, weighed only 500 grams.

This weight limit was again taken by world technical thought only ... on March 6, 1983, i.e. a quarter of a century later. True, Kupriyanovich's model was not so elegant and was a box with toggle switches and a round dialer dial, to which an ordinary telephone receiver was connected on a wire. It turned out that during the conversation either both hands were occupied, or the box had to be hung on the belt. On the other hand, holding a light plastic handset from a household phone was much more convenient than a device with the weight of an army pistol (According to Martin Cooper, using a mobile phone helped him pump up his muscles well).

According to Kupriyanovich's calculations, his apparatus should have cost 300-400 Soviet rubles. It was equal to the cost of a good TV or a light motorcycle; at such a price, the device would be available, of course, not to every Soviet family, but quite a few could save up for it if they wished. Commercial mobile phones of the early 80s with a price of 3500-4000 US dollars were also not affordable for all Americans - the millionth subscriber appeared only in 1990.

According to L.I. Kupriyanovich in his article published in the February issue of the journal "Technology-Youth" for 1959, now up to a thousand communication channels of radiophones with the Asia-Pacific Region could be placed on one wave. To do this, the coding of the number in the radiophone was carried out in a pulsed way, and during a conversation, the signal was compressed using a device that the author of the radiophone called a correlator. According to the description in the same article, the correlator was based on the principle of the vocoder - the division of the speech signal into several frequency ranges, compression of each range and subsequent restoration at the reception point. True, the recognition of the voice should have deteriorated, but with the quality of the then wired communication, this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing the ATP on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees installed a base station fifteen years later on top of a 50-story building in New York). And judging by the phrase “pocket radiophones made by the author of this article”, we can conclude that in 1959 Kupriyanovich manufactured at least two experimental mobile phones.

The device of 1958 was already more like mobile phones

“So far there are only prototypes of the new device, but there is no doubt that it will soon be widely used in transport, in the city telephone network, in industry, at construction sites, etc.” writes Kupriyanovich in the journal Science and Life in August 1957. However, three years later, any publications about the further fate of the development, threatening to make a revolution in communications, disappear in the press altogether. Moreover, the inventor himself does not disappear anywhere; for example, in the February issue of YUT for 1960, he publishes a description of a radio station with an automatic call and a range of 40-50 km, and in the January issue of the same "Technology - Youth" for 1961 - a popular article on microelectronics technologies, in which there is never any mention of a radiophone.

All this is so strange and unusual that it involuntarily suggests the thought: was there really a working radio background?

Skeptics first of all pay attention to the fact that in the publications that popular science publications devoted to the radio background, the sensational fact of the first telephone calls was not covered. From the photographs, it is also impossible to accurately determine whether the inventor is calling on a mobile phone, or just posing. Hence the version arises: yes, there was an attempt to create a mobile phone, but technically the device could not be completed, so they did not write about it anymore. However, let's think about the question: why should the journalists of the 50s consider the call a separate event worthy of mention in the press? “So that means phone? Not bad, not bad. And on it, it turns out, you can also call? This is just a miracle! I would never have believed it!"

Common sense suggests that in 1957-1959 not a single Soviet popular science magazine would write about a non-working design. Such magazines already had something to write about. Satellites fly in space. Physicists have established that the cascade hyperon decays into a lambda null particle and a negative pi meson. Sound technicians restored the original sound of Lenin's voice. Thanks to the TU-104, you can get from Moscow to Khabarovsk in 11 hours and 35 minutes. Computers translate from one language to another and play chess. The construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station has begun. Schoolchildren from the Chkalovskaya station made a robot that sees and speaks. Against the backdrop of these events, the creation of a mobile phone is not a sensation at all. Readers are waiting for videophones! “Telephone sets with screens can be built even today, our technology is strong enough,” they write in the same “TM” ... in 1956. “Millions of viewers are waiting for the radio engineering industry to start producing color TV sets. It is high time to think about television broadcasting by wire (cable TV - O.I.),” we read in the same issue. And here, you understand, the mobile is somehow outdated, even without a video camera and a color display. Well, who would write at least half a word about her if she did not work?

Then why did the “first call” come to be considered a sensation? The answer is simple: Martin Cooper wanted it that way. On April 3, 1973, he held a PR campaign. In order for Motorola to be able to obtain permission to use radio frequencies for civilian mobile communications from the Federal Communications Commission (Federal Communications Commissions or FCC), it was necessary to somehow show that mobile communications really have a future. Moreover, competitors claimed the same frequencies. It's no coincidence that Martin Cooper's first call, according to his own account to the San Francisco Chronicle, was to a rival: “It was this guy from AT&T who was promoting car phones. His name was Joel Angel. I called him and told him that I was calling from the street, from a real "manual" cell phone. I don't remember what he said. But you know, I could hear his teeth grinding."

Kupriyanovich did not need to share frequencies with a competing company in 1957-1959 and listen to their gnashing of teeth on a mobile phone. He did not even need to catch up and overtake America, due to the absence of other participants in the race. Like Cooper, Kupriyanovich also carried out PR campaigns, as was customary in the USSR. He came to the editorial offices of popular science publications, demonstrated devices, and wrote articles about them himself. It is likely that the letters "YuT" in the name of the first apparatus are a trick to interest the editors of the "Young Technician" in placing its publication. For unknown reasons, only the leading amateur radio magazine of the country, Radio, as well as all other designs of Kupriyanovich, except for the pocket radio of 1955, bypassed the topic of the radio background.

Did Kupriyanovich himself have motives for showing a non-working apparatus - for example, in order to achieve success or recognition? In the publications of the 50s, the place of work of the inventor is not indicated, the media present him to readers as a "radio amateur" or "engineer". However, it is known that Leonid Ivanovich lived and worked in Moscow, he was awarded the degree of candidate of technical sciences, later he worked at the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR and in the early 60s had a car (for which, by the way, he himself created a radiotelephone and anti-theft radio alarm) . In other words, by Soviet standards, he was a successful person. Doubters can also check out a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including one adapted for young technicians, the LK-1. From all this it follows that the 1958 mobile phone was built and worked.

Altai-1″ at the end of the 50s looked like a more real project than pocket mobile phones

Unlike Kupriyanovich's radiophone, Altai had specific customers on whom the allocation of funds depended. In addition, the main problem in the implementation of both projects was not at all in creating a portable device, but in the need for significant investments and time in creating the communication infrastructure and its debugging and the cost of maintaining it. During the deployment of "Altai", for example, in Kiev, the output lamps of the transmitters failed, in Tashkent there were problems due to poor-quality installation of base station equipment. As the Radio magazine wrote, in 1968 the Altai system was deployed only in Moscow and Kiev, Samarkand, Tashkent, Donetsk and Odessa were next in line.

In the Altai system, it was easier to provide coverage of the area, because. the subscriber could move away from the central base station at a distance of up to 60 km, and outside the city there were enough linear stations located along the roads for 40-60 km. Eight transmitters served up to 500-800 subscribers, and the transmission quality was comparable only to digital communications. The implementation of this project looked more realistic than the deployment of a national cellular network based on Radiofon.

Nevertheless, the idea of ​​a mobile phone, despite the apparent untimeliness, was not buried at all. There were also industrial samples of the device!

Western European countries also made attempts to create mobile communications before the "historic Cooper call". So, April 11, 1972, i.e. a year earlier, the British firm Pye Telecommunications demonstrated at the Communications Today, Tomorrow and the Future exhibition at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, a portable mobile phone that could call the city's telephone network.
The mobile phone consisted of a Pocketphone 70 walkie-talkie used by the police, and a set-top box - a handset with a push-button dial that could be held in the hands. The phone operated in the range of 450-470 MHz, according to the Pocketphone 70 radio, it could have up to 12 channels and was powered by a 15 V source.

There is also information about the existence in France in the 60s of a mobile phone created with semi-automatic switching of subscribers. The digits of the dialed number were displayed on the decatrons at the base station, after which the telephone operator manually switched. There is no exact data on why such a strange dialing system was adopted at the moment, we can only assume that the possible reason was errors in transmitting the number that the telephone operator eliminated.

But back to the fate of Kupriyanovich. In the 60s, he moved away from the creation of radio stations and switched to a new direction, lying at the junction of electronics and medicine - the use of cybernetics to expand the capabilities of the human brain. He publishes popular articles on hypnopedia - methods of teaching a person in a dream, and in 1970 the Nauka publishing house published his book Memory Improvement Reserves. Cybernetic Aspects”, which, in particular, considers the problems of “recording” information into the subconscious during a special “sleep at the information level”. To put a person into the state of such a dream, Kupriyanovich creates the “Ritmoson” device and puts forward the idea of ​​a new service - mass teaching people in their sleep by phone, and the biocurrents of people control the sleep devices through the central computer.
But this idea of ​​Kupriyanovich remains unrealized, and in his book Biological Rhythms and Sleep, published in 1973, the Ritmoson device is mainly positioned as a device for correcting sleep disorders. The reasons, perhaps, should be sought in the phrase from the "Reserves for improving memory": "The task of improving memory is to solve the problem of controlling the consciousness, and through it, to a large extent, the subconscious." At the information level, a person in a state of sleep can, in principle, memorize not only foreign words for memorization, but also advertising slogans, background information designed for unconscious perception, and a person is not able to control this process, and may not even remember whether he is in such a state of sleep. There are too many moral and ethical problems here, and the current human society is clearly not ready for the mass application of such technologies.

Other mobile communication pioneers also changed the subject of work.

By the end of the war, Georgy Babat focused on his other idea - transport powered by microwave radiation, made more than a hundred inventions, became a doctor of science, was awarded the Stalin Prize, and also became famous as an author of science fiction.

Alfred Gross went on to work as a microwave and communications engineer for Sperry and General Electric. He continued to create until his death at the age of 82.

Hristo Bachvarov in 1967 took up the system of radio synchronization of city clocks, for which he received two gold medals at the Leipzig Fair, headed the Institute of Radio Electronics, and was awarded by the country's leadership for other developments. Later he switched to high-frequency ignition systems in automobile engines.

Martin Cooper led a small private company, ArrayComm, to market its own technology for fast wireless Internet.

instead of an epilogue. Thirty years after the creation of LK-1, on April 9, 1987, at the KALASTAJATORPPA hotel in Helsinki (Finland), General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee M.S. Gorbachev made a mobile call to the USSR Ministry of Communications in the presence of Nokia Vice President Stefan Widomski. So the mobile phone became a means of influencing the minds of politicians - just like the first satellite in the Khrushchev era. Although, unlike the satellite, the operating mobile phone was not actually an indicator of technical superiority - the same Khrushchev had the opportunity to call on it ...

"Wait!" the reader will object. "So who should be considered the creator of the first mobile phone - Cooper, Kupriyanovich, Bachvarov?"
It seems that it makes no sense to oppose the results of the work here. Economic opportunities for the mass use of the new service were formed only by 1990.

It is possible that there were other attempts to create a wearable mobile phone that were ahead of their time, and humanity will someday remember them.

PS: thanks to ihoraksjuta for an interesting idea.

And from the technical points of interest, I would advise you to remember about The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy is made -