The telephone was created during a period that was considered the era of the telegraph. This device was in demand everywhere and was considered the most advanced means of communication. The ability to transmit sound over distances has become a real sensation. In this article, we will remember who invented the first telephone, in what year it happened, and how it was created.

A breakthrough in communications development

The invention of electricity was an important step towards the creation of telephony. It was this discovery that made it possible to transmit information over distances. In 1837, after Morse introduced his telegraph alphabet and broadcasting apparatus to the general public, the electronic telegraph began to be used everywhere. However, at the end of the 19th century it was replaced by a more advanced device.

In what year was the telephone invented?

The telephone owes its appearance, first of all, to the German scientist Philip Rice. It was this man who was able to construct a device that allows one to transfer a person’s voice over long distances using galvanic current. This event occurred in 1861, but there were still 15 years left before the creation of the first telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell is considered the creator of the telephone, and the year of invention of the telephone is 1876. It was then that the Scottish scientist presented his first device at the World Exhibition, and also applied for a patent for the invention. Bell's telephone worked at a distance of no more than 200 meters and had severe sound distortion, but a year later the scientist improved the device so much that it was used unchanged for the next hundred years.

History of the invention of the telephone

Alexander Bell's discovery was made by chance during experiments to improve the telegraph. The scientist's goal was to obtain a device that would allow the simultaneous transmission of more than 5 telegrams. To do this, he created several pairs of records tuned to different frequencies. During the next experiment, a small accident occurred, as a result of which one of the plates got stuck. The scientist’s partner, seeing what happened, began to swear. At this time, Bell himself was working on the receiving device. At some point, he heard faint sounds of disturbance from the transmitter. This is how the story of the invention of the telephone begins.

After Bell demonstrated his device, many scientists began working in the field of telephony. Thousands of patents were issued for inventions that improved the first device. Among the most significant discoveries are:

• invention of the bell - the device created by A. Bell did not have a bell, and the subscriber was notified using a whistle. In 1878
  T. Watson made the first telephone bell;
• creation of a microphone - in 1878, the Russian engineer M. Makhalsky designed a carbon microphone;
• creation of an automatic station - the first station with 10,000 numbers was developed in 1894 by S.M. Apostolov.

The patent Bell received became one of the most profitable not only in the United States, but also in the world. The scientist became extremely rich and world famous. However, in fact, the first person to create the telephone was not Alexander Bell, and in 2002 the US Congress recognized this.

Antonio Meucci: pioneer of telephone communication

In 1860, an inventor and scientist from Italy created a device capable of transmitting sound through wires. When answering the question of what year the telephone was invented, you can safely name this date, since the true discoverer is Antonio Meucci. He called his “brainchild” a telephony. At the time of his discovery, the scientist lived in the United States of America; he was already old and in a very deplorable financial situation. Soon, a large American company, Western Union, became interested in the development of an unknown scientist.

Representatives of the company offered the scientist a substantial sum for all the drawings and developments, and also promised to provide assistance in filing a patent. The difficult financial situation forced the talented inventor to sell all the material from his research. The scientist waited a long time for help from the company, however, having lost patience, he himself applied for a patent. His request was not granted, and the real blow for him was the message about the great invention of Alexander Bell.

Meucci tried to defend his rights in court, but he did not have enough funds to fight a large company. The Italian inventor managed to win the right to a patent only in 1887, by the time its validity expired. Meucci was never able to take advantage of the rights to his invention and died in obscurity and poverty. Recognition came to the Italian inventor only in 2002. According to a resolution of the US Congress, he was the person who invented the telephone.

Motorola employee Martin Cooper

In 1973, the first prototype of a portable cell phone, the Motorola DynaTAC, was released.

Its release provides an answer to the question: the first mobile phone in the world?

What year did it appear?

The historic call on the world's first mobile phone took place on April 3, 1973, when its creator, Motorola employee Martin Cooper, called Joel Engel, head of the research department at Bell Laboratories.

It is noteworthy that Joel Engel was chosen as an interlocutor for a reason. The fact is that in those days AT&T was the unofficial leader in the field of development mobile technologies. Many believed that the engineers of this particular company would be able to create the first such device.

Who invented it and how it started

The idea of ​​the mobile phone in its modern version was born from a less mobile prototype - the car radiotelephone. These devices were extremely bulky, weighing about 15 kilograms, but, nevertheless, their popularity grew every day.

Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer who was involved in this area, proposed modifying the phone, reducing the weight so that people could carry it with them without any problems. Some companies also worked on reducing the weight of the phone, but Motorola was far ahead of all competitors. It took Cooper 15 years and $90 million to implement Cooper's idea.

Motorola DynaTAC 8000X - the first mobile phone

On that memorable day, April 3, 1973, a bell rang in the office of the head of the Bell Laboratories design bureau, Joel Engel. He picked up the phone and heard the voice of his sworn enemy - Martin, who said: "Guess where I'm calling from?.. I'm calling you from a real cell phone." Cooper later recalled: “I don’t remember what he answered then, but, you know, I thought I heard his teeth grinding.”

First call cost

It is worth noting that the cost of the first mobile phone call in human history was about $90 million. Motorola made such investments during the design process of the device.

Martin Cooper demonstrating the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X in 2007

Joel Engel can be understood - the era of new communications was beginning, and Bell Laboratories was rapidly flying into the ditch of history. Later, life put everything in its place - Bell did not go into oblivion, but showed itself in mobile communications no less than Motorola.

How much did he weigh

The world's first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (prototype), weighed about 1.15 kg and had dimensions of 22.5 x 12.5 x 3.75 cm. A small LED display showed the phone being dialed. The battery charge lasted for 30 minutes of conversation, but it took about 10 hours to charge it.

A total of 5 DynaTACs were manufactured until 1983, and from 83 an improved commercial version of this model was produced, which weighed 850 grams and sold for $3,995. During the first year of sales, 12 thousand Americans acquired mobile phones.

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

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

On April 3, 1973, the head of Motorola's mobile communications division, Martin Cooper, was walking through the center of Manhattan and decided to make a call on his cell phone. The mobile phone was called Dyna-TAC and looked like a brick, weighed more than a kilogram, and had a talk time of only half an hour.

Prior to this, the son of the founder of Motorola, Robert Gelvin, who at that time held the post of executive director of this company, allocated $15 million and gave his subordinates a period of 10 years to create a device that the user could carry with him. The first working sample appeared just a couple of months later. The success of Martin Cooper, who joined the company in 1954 as an ordinary engineer, was facilitated by the fact that since 1967 he had been developing portable walkie-talkies. They led to the idea of ​​the mobile phone.

It is believed that until this point, other mobile telephones that a person can carry with him, like a watch or notebook, did not exist. There were walkie-talkies, there were “mobile” phones that could be used in a car or train, but there was no such thing for just walking down the street.

Moreover, until the early 1960s, many companies refused to conduct research into creating cellular communications, since they came to the conclusion that, in principle, it is impossible to create a compact cellular telephone nal apparatus. And none of the specialists from these companies paid attention to the fact that on the other side of the Iron Curtain, photographs began to appear in popular science magazines depicting... a man talking on a mobile phone. (For those in doubt, the numbers of the magazines where the pictures were published will be given, so that everyone can be sure that this is not a graphics editor).

Hoax? Joke? Propaganda? An attempt to misinform Western electronics manufacturers (this industry, as is known, was of strategic military importance)? Maybe we are just talking about 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 photo 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 cell phone call 15 years before Cooper. But before we talk about this, let us remember that the basic principles of mobile communications have a very, very long history.

Actually, attempts to make the phone mobile appeared soon after its inception. Field telephones with coils were created to quickly lay a line, and attempts were made to quickly provide communication from a car by throwing wires onto a line running along the highway or connecting to a socket on a pole. Of all this, only field phones have found relatively wide distribution (at one of the mosaics of the Kyiv metro station in Moscow, modern passengers sometimes mistake a field phone for a mobile phone and laptop).

It became possible to ensure true mobility of telephone communications only after the advent of radio communications in the VHF range. By the 1930s, transmitters had 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, such means of communication have not yet provided connections with automatic telephone exchanges.

Portable VHF transmitter. "Radiofront", 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 1000-2000 MHz (currently the GSM standard uses frequencies 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 Hz), 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 Leika film machine,” wrote G. Babat in his article “Monophone” in the Tekhnika-Molodezhi magazine No. 7-8 for 1943: “Wherever the subscriber is - at home, away or at work, in the foyer of a theater, on the stands of a stadium, watching competitions - everywhere he can connect his individual monophone to one of the many ends of the wave network branches. Several subscribers can connect to one end, and no matter how many there are, they will not interfere with each other friend." Due to the fact that the principles of cellular communications had not yet been invented at that time, Babat proposed using an extensive network of microwave waveguides to connect mobile phones with the base station.

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

In December 1947, Douglas Ring and Ray Young, employees of the American company Bell, proposed the principle of hexagonal cells for mobile telephony. This happened right in the midst of intense efforts to create a phone that could be used to make calls from a car. The first such service was launched in 1946 in St. Louis by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1947 a system was launched with intermediate stations along the highway, allowing calls from a car on the way from New York to Boston. However, due to imperfections and high cost, these systems were not commercially successful. In 1948, another American telephone company in Richmond managed to establish an auto-dialing car radio telephone service, which was already better. The weight of the equipment of such systems was tens of kilograms and it was placed in the trunk, so thoughts about pocket version An inexperienced person had no idea about looking at her.

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

However, 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 power of only 1 watt and fit under the instrument panel. The power was from a car battery.

The telephone number assigned to the car was connected to the radio installed at the city telephone exchange. To call a city subscriber, you had to turn on the device in the car, which sent your call signs on the air. They were perceived by the base station on the city PBX and the telephone set immediately turned on, working like a regular telephone. When calling a car, the city subscriber dialed the number, this activated the base station, the signal of which was received by the device on the car.

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

It was expected that the telephone system of Shapiro and Zakharchenko would be widely used in the work of fire brigades, air defense units, police, emergency medical and technical assistance. However, there was no further information about the development of the system. It can be assumed that it was considered more expedient for emergency rescue services to use their own departmental communication systems rather than use the GTS.

Alfred Gross could become the creator of the first mobile phone.

In the United States, the inventor Alfred Gross was the first to try to do the impossible. Since 1939, he was passionate about creating portable walkie-talkies, which decades later were called “walkie-talkies.” In 1949, he created a device based on a walkie-talkie, which he called “wireless.” remote telephone" The device could be carried with you, and it 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 telephone companies showed no interest in this new product, or in his other ideas in this direction. So America lost the chance to become the birthplace of the first practically working mobile phone.

However, these ideas were developed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USSR. So, one of those who continued the 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 described 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 surnames of Kupriyanovich and Cooper is only the initial link in a chain of strange coincidences in the fate of these individuals. 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 he created in 1955 weighed the same as the first transistor walkie-talkies of the early 60s.

Pocket walkie-talkie Kupriyanovich 1955

In 1957, Kupriyanovich demonstrates an even more amazing thing - a walkie-talkie the size of Matchbox and weighing only 50 grams (including power supplies), which can work for 50 hours without changing the power supply and provides communication over a range of two kilometers - quite comparable to the products of the 21st century, which can be seen on the windows of current communication stores (photo from UT magazine, 3 , 1957). As evidenced by the publication in YuT, 12, 1957, this radio station used mercury or manganese batteries.

At the same time, Kupriyanovich not only did 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 Radios.”

The 1960 publication describes a simple radio with just three transistors that can be worn on the wrist - much like the famous watch-talkie from the film "Off Season". The author offered it for repetition by tourists and mushroom pickers, but in real life it was mainly students who showed interest in this design by Kupriyanovich - for tips on exams, which was even included in an episode of Gaidaev’s film comedy “Operation Y”

Kupriyanovich's wrist radio

And, just like Cooper, pocket walkie-talkies inspired Kupriyanovich to make a radiotelephone from which he could call any city telephone, and which he could take with him anywhere. The pessimistic sentiments of foreign companies could not stop a man who knew how to make walkie-talkies from matchboxes.

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

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 ATR - automatic telephone radio station), which received signals from mobile phones to the wired network and transmitted signals from the wired network to mobile phones. 50 years ago, the principles of operation of a mobile phone were described for inexperienced cleaners simply and figuratively: “The ATP connection with any subscriber occurs like a regular telephone, only we control its operation from a distance.”
To operate 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 tube for a telephone. But it turns out that this is not so. “The question involuntarily arises: won’t several simultaneously operating LK-1s interfere with each other?” - writes the same “Science and Life”. “No, because in this case the device uses different tonal frequencies, causing its relays to operate on the ATP (the tonal frequencies will be transmitted on the same wavelength). The frequencies of sound transmission and reception will be different for each device in order to avoid their mutual influence.”

Thus, in LK-1 there was encoding of the number in the telephone itself, and not depending on the wire line, which allows it to be rightfully considered as the first mobile phone. True, judging by the description, this coding was very primitive, and the number of subscribers who had the opportunity to work through one ATP was at first very limited. In addition, in the first demonstrator, the ATP was simply connected to a regular telephone parallel to an existing subscriber point - this made it possible to begin experiments without making changes to the city PBX, but made it difficult to simultaneously “go into the city” from several handsets. However, in 1957 the LK-1 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 1957 issue of the magazine “Young Technician”. “If within these limits there is only one receiving device, this will be enough to talk with any city resident who has a telephone, and for any number of kilometers.” “Radiotelephones...can be used on vehicles, airplanes and ships. Passengers will be able to call home, work, or book a hotel room directly from the plane. It will find use among tourists, builders, hunters, etc.”

Comic strip in UT magazine, 7, 1957: Tonton calls his family in Paris on his mobile phone from the Moscow festival. Now this should not surprise anyone.

In addition, Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would 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 intended to implement mobile phones in two stages. “At first, while there are few radio telephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near the car owner’s home telephone. But later, when there are thousands of such devices, 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 tonal frequency, causing its own relay to work.” Thus, Kupriyanovich essentially positioned two types at once household appliances- simple radio handsets, which were easier to put into production, and 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 the speaker speakerphone. “Behind the wheel”, 12, 1957

One can be surprised how accurately Kupriyanovich imagined more than half a century ago how widely the mobile phone would become part of our everyday life.
“By taking such a radiophone with you, you are essentially taking an ordinary telephone set, but without wires,” he wrote a couple of years later. “No matter where you are, you can always be found by phone, you just have to dial the known number of your radiophone from any landline phone (even from a pay phone). The phone rings in your pocket and you start a conversation. If necessary, you can dial any city number directly from a tram, trolleybus, or bus. phone number, call " Ambulance", fire or emergency vehicle, contact home..."
It's hard to believe that these words were written by a person who has not visited 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, Kupryanovich, at the request of radio amateurs, published in the February issue of the magazine “Young Technician” a simplified design of the device, the ATR of which can only work with 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 a subscriber, it was necessary, in addition to the receiver, to also turn on the transmitter on the handset. Having heard a long telephone beep in the earpiece and made the appropriate switches, one could proceed to dialing the number. But it was still more convenient than on radio stations of that time, since there was no need to switch from receiving to transmitting and ending 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 magazine for youth, Kupriyanovich was not afraid of competition. By this time, he had already prepared a new model of the device, which at that time could be considered revolutionary.

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

The 1958 model of a mobile phone, including its power source, weighed only 500 grams.

This milestone was again taken by world technical thought only... 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 disk, to which a regular telephone handset was connected via a wire. It turned out that when talking, either both hands were occupied, or the box had to be hung on the belt. On the other hand, holding a light plastic tube from a household phone in your hands 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 device should have cost 300-400 Soviet rubles. It was equal to the cost of a good television or a light motorcycle; At such a price, the device would, of course, not be available to every Soviet family, but quite a few would be able to save up for it if they wanted. 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 for Youth” for 1959, it was now possible to place up to a thousand communication channels of radiophones with the Asia-Pacific region on one wavelength. To do this, the encoding of the number in the radiophone was done in a pulsed manner, 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 work of the correlator was based on the vocoder principle - dividing the speech signal into several frequency ranges, compressing each range and subsequent restoration at the receiving site. True, the recognition of the voice should have deteriorated, but given the quality of the then wired communication this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing an ATP on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees fifteen years later installed a base station 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 similar to mobile phones

“So far there are only prototypes of the new device, but there is no doubt that it will soon become widespread in transport, in the city telephone network, in industry, on construction sites, etc.” Kupriyanovich writes in the journal “Science and Life” in August 1957. However, three years later, any publications about the further fate of the development, which threatens to make a revolution in communications, completely disappear in the press. Moreover, the inventor himself does not disappear anywhere; for example, in the February issue of "UT" for 1960, he publishes a description of a radio station with automatic calling and a range of 40-50 km, and in the January issue of the same "Technology for Youth" for 1961 - a popular article about microelectronics technologies, in which There is no mention of a radiophone.

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

Skeptics first of all pay attention to the fact that the publications that popular science publications devoted to the radiophone did not cover the sensational fact of the first telephone calls. It is also impossible to accurately determine from photographs whether the inventor is calling on a cell phone or is simply posing. This gives rise to a version: yes, there was an attempt to create a mobile phone, but technically the device could not be completed, so no more was written about it. However, let us think about the question: why on earth should journalists of the 50s consider the call to be a separate event worthy of mention in the press? “So this means a telephone? Not bad, not bad. And it turns out that you can also call on it? This is just a miracle! I would never have believed it!”

Common sense dictates that not a single Soviet popular science magazine would write about a non-working structure in 1957-1959. Such magazines already had something to write about. Satellites fly in space. Physicists have found that a cascade hyperon decays into a lambda-zero 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 35 minutes. Computers translate from one language to another and play chess. 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 video phones! “Telephone sets with screens can be built even today, our technology is strong enough,” they write in the same “TM” ... in 1956. “Millions of television viewers are waiting for the radio industry to start producing televisions with color images... It’s high time to think about television broadcasting over wires (cable TV - O.I.),” we read in the same issue. And here, you see, the mobile phone is somehow outdated, even without a video camera and a color display. Well, who would write even half a word about her if she didn’t 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 carried out a PR campaign. In order for Motorola to obtain permission to use radio frequencies for civilian mobile communications from the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC), it was necessary to somehow show that mobile communications really had a future. Moreover, competitors were vying for the same frequencies. And it’s no coincidence that Martin Cooper’s first call, according to his own story to journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle, was addressed to a rival: “It was a guy from AT&T who was promoting phones for cars. His name was Joel Angel. I called him and told him that I was calling from the street, from a real “handheld” cell phone. I don't remember what he answered. But you know, I heard his teeth grinding.”

In 1957-1959, Kupriyanovich did not need to share frequencies with a competing company 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 the devices, and wrote articles about them himself. It is likely that the letters “YUT” in the name of the first device are a device to interest the editors of “Young Technician” to publish it. For unknown reasons, the topic of the radiophone was only covered by the country's leading amateur radio magazine - "Radio", as well as all other Kupriyanovich designs - except for the pocket radio of 1955.

Did Kupriyanovich himself have motives for showing a non-working device - for example, to achieve success or recognition? In publications of the 50s, the inventor’s place of work 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 academic degree of Candidate of Technical Sciences, he subsequently worked at the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and in the early 60s had a car (for which, by the way, he himself created a radiotelephone and an anti-theft radio alarm) . In other words, by Soviet standards he was a successful person. Doubters can also check a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including the LK-1 adapted for young technicians. From all this it follows that the 1958 mobile phone was built and worked.

Altai-1″ in the late 50s looked like a more realistic 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 implementing both projects was not at all in creating a portable device, but in the need for significant investments and time in creating a communication infrastructure and its debugging and the costs of its maintenance. During the deployment of Altai, for example, in Kyiv, transmitter output lamps failed, and in Tashkent, problems arose due to poor-quality installation of base station equipment. As Radio magazine wrote, in 1968 the Altai system was deployed only in Moscow and Kyiv, followed by Samarkand, Tashkent, Donetsk and Odessa.

In the Altai system, it was easier to provide terrain coverage, because the subscriber could move up to 60 km from the central base station, and outside the city there were enough linear stations located along 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.

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

Western European countries also attempted to create mobile communications before Cooper's historic call. So, April 11, 1972, i.e. a year earlier, the British company Pye Telecommunications demonstrated at the Communications Today, Tomorrow and the Future exhibition at London's Royal Lancaster Hotel a portable mobile phone that could be used to call the city's telephone network.
The mobile phone consisted of a Pocketphone 70 radio, used by the police, and a set-top box - a handset with a push-button dial that could be held in your hands. The phone operated in the range of 450-470 MHz, judging by 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 with semi-automatic switching of subscribers. The digits of the dialed number were displayed on dekatrons at the base station, after which the telephone operator manually performed the switching. At the moment, there is no exact data on why such a strange dialing system was adopted; one can only assume that a possible reason was errors in transmitting the number, which were corrected by the telephone operator.

But let's return to the fate of Kupriyanovich. In the 60s, he moved away from creating radio stations and switched to a new direction, lying at the intersection 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 his book “Reserves for Improving Memory” was published by the Nauka publishing house. Cybernetic aspects”, in which, in particular, he examines the problems of “recording” information into the subconscious during a special “sleep at the information level”. To put a person into a state of such sleep, Kupriyanovich creates the Rhythmoson device, and puts forward the idea of ​​​​a new service - mass training of people in their sleep over the phone, and the biocurrents of people control the sleep devices through a central computer.
But this idea of ​​Kupriyanovich remains unrealized, and in his book “Biological Rhythms and Sleep”, published in 1973, the “Ritmoson” apparatus is mainly positioned as a device for the correction of sleep disorders. The reasons, perhaps, should be sought in the phrase from “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.” For a person in a state of sleep, at the information level, in principle, it is possible to write into memory not only foreign words for memorization, but also advertising slogans, background information designed for unconscious perception, and the person is not able to control this process, and may not even remember whether he is in a state of such sleep. Too many moral and ethical problems arise here, and current human society is clearly not ready for the mass use of such technologies.

Other mobile pioneers have also switched gears.

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 the author of science fiction works.

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

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

Martin Cooper headed a small private company, ArrayComm, which is promoting its own fast wireless Internet technology to the market.

Instead of an epilogue. 30 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. Thus, the mobile phone became a means of influencing the minds of politicians - just like the first satellite during the time of Khrushchev. Although, unlike a satellite, a working mobile phone was not actually an indicator of technical superiority - the same Khrushchev was able to call using it...

“Wait!” - the reader will object. “So who should be considered the creator of the first mobile phone - Cooper, Kupriyanovich, Bachvarov?”
It seems that there is no point in contrasting the results of the work here. Economic opportunities for mass use of the new service emerged only in 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.

P.S.: thanks to friend ihoraksjuta for an interesting idea.

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

The very first mobile phone in the world was created by the Soviet engineer Kupriyanovich L.I. in 1957. The device was named LK-1.

Kupriyanovich L.I. and his LK-1 - the very first mobile phone in the world

1957

The weight of the portable mobile phone LK-1 was 3 kg. The battery charge was enough for 20-30 hours of operation, the range was 20-30 km. The solutions used in the phone were patented on November 1, 1957.

1958

By 1958, Kupriyanovich had reduced the weight of the device to 500. It was a box with toggle switches and a dial for dialing numbers. An ordinary telephone handset was connected to the box. There were two ways to hold the device during a call. Firstly, you could use two hands to hold the tube and box, which is not convenient. Or you could hang the box on your belt, then use only one hand to hold the tube.

The question arises why Kupriyanovich used a handset and did not build speakers into the phone itself. The fact is that using the tube was considered more convenient because of its lightness; it is much easier to hold a plastic tube weighing a few grams than the entire apparatus. As Martin Cooper later admitted, using his very first mobile phone helped him build up his muscles quite well. According to Kupriyanovich’s calculations, if the device was put into mass production, its cost could be 300-400 rubles, which was approximately equal to the cost of a TV.

1961

In 1961, Kupriyanovich demonstrated a telephone weighing 70 grams, which fit in the palm of your hand and had a range of 80 km. It used semiconductors and a nickel-cadmium battery. There was also a smaller version of the dial dial. The disk was small and was not intended to be rotated with fingers; most likely it was intended to be used with a pen or pencil. The plans of the creator of the very first cell phone in the world were to create a portable phone the size of a matchbox and a range of 200 km. It is quite possible that such a device was created, but was used only by special services.

1963

In 1963, the Altai mobile phone was released in the USSR. The development of the device began in 1958 at the Voronezh Research Institute of Communications. The designers created subscriber stations (phones themselves) and base stations that ensured stable communication between subscribers. It was originally intended for installation in ambulances, taxis, and trucks. However, later, for the most part, officials at various levels began to use them.

By 1970, the Altai telephone was used in 30 Soviet cities. The device made it possible to create conferences, for example, a manager could simultaneously communicate with several subordinates. Each owner of the Altai phone had his own possibilities for using it. Some had the opportunity to call other countries, some to phones in a specific city, and some only to specific numbers.

Early 60s

In the early 60s, the Bulgarian engineer Hristo Bachvarov created a model of a portable telephone, for which he received the Dimitrov Prize. The sample was demonstrated to Soviet cosmonauts, including Alexei Leonov. Unfortunately, the device was not put into mass production, since this required transistors of Japanese and American production. A total of two samples were created.

1965

In 1965, based on the developments of L.I. Kupriyanovich, the creator of the very first mobile phone in the world, the Bulgarian company Radioelectronics created a mobile communication kit consisting of a handset-sized mobile phone and a base station with 15 numbers. The device was presented at the Moscow exhibition "Inforga-65".

1966

In 1966, at the Interorgtekhnika-66 exhibition held in Moscow, Bulgarian engineers demonstrated the ATRT-05 and PAT-05 telephone models, which were later put into production. They were used on construction sites and energy facilities. Initially, one RATC-10 base station served only 6 numbers. Later this number increased to 69, and then to 699 numbers.

1967

In 1967, the Carry Phone Co. (USA, California) introduced the Carry Phone mobile phone. Externally, the mobile phone was a standard diplomat, to which a telephone handset was connected. His weight was 4.5 kg. When there was an incoming call, short rings were heard inside the diplomat, after which it was necessary to open the diplomat and answer the call.

As for outgoing calls, the Carry Phone was very inconvenient. In order to make an outgoing call, it was necessary to select one of 11 channels, after which the operator connected to the telephone company, and that, in turn, connected the owner of the device to a specific number. This was not convenient for the owner of the phone, but nevertheless made it possible to use the already existing infrastructure of the car radiotelephone. The cost of the Carry Phone was 3 thousand dollars.

1972

On April 11, 1972, Pye Telecommunications (Britain) introduced its portable telephone, thanks to which its owner could call any landline number. The 12-channel device consisted of a Pocketphone 70 walkie-talkie and a small box with buttons for dialing numbers.

1973

On April 3, 1973, the head of Motorola's mobile communications division, Martin Cooper, introduced a prototype of the DynaTAC cell phone. Many believe that this particular device is the very first cell phone in the world, but this is not so. His weight was 1.15 kg. The battery charge was enough for 35 minutes of operation; recharging required 10 hours. There was an LED display that showed only the numbers being dialed.

The life of a modern person is closely connected with mobile phones, and there is a lot of evidence of this. Imagine, for example, a situation where you accidentally left your beloved, irreplaceable and precious smartphone at home. How will you feel at this moment? It's uncomfortable to say the least, isn't it? However, there were times when people did not have phones at all, and not only mobile phones, but also landlines. How did they manage without them? Read our article.

Life without phones

Just some 200 years ago, people did not even know what telephones were. Previously, whistles, gongs, ringing bells and drumming were used to transmit messages over a distance.

However, all these methods were imperfect.

By the way, in order to transmit the signal as far as possible, it was necessary to create intermediate points at which people were on duty. In this case, the sound came to the recipient through a chain. We all understand that this was a very long process. Of course, it was possible to solve this problem, for example, transmit information through water and metal. In this case, the signal would travel faster and fade out much later. But for some reason this was not done, at least everywhere.

Invention of the first telephone

We traditionally associate the appearance of the telephone with the name of the American inventor Alexander Bell. The famous researcher actually took a direct part in the development of the revolutionary apparatus. However, other people also played a vital role in the creation of the first telephone.

In 1860, naturalist Antonio Meucci published an article in an Italian newspaper in New York, in which he spoke about his invention, capable of transmitting sounds over electrical wires. Meucci called his device Teletrofono. In 1871, he decided to patent the Teletrofono, but was unable to do so due to financial problems.

A year later, in 1861, the German physicist and inventor Johann Philipp Reis demonstrated his “mobile phone” at a meeting of scientists of the Physical Society. The device could transmit musical tones and human speech over wires. The device had a microphone of an original design, a power source (galvanic battery) and a speaker. Reis himself named the device he designed Telephon. Many sources from the time claim that the first message the physicist sent on his telephone was the phrase “Das Pferd frisst Keinen Gurkensalat” (“The horse does not eat cucumber salad”). The absurdity of this information made it possible to verify that the words were heard correctly, from which it follows that the transmitter was working as it should.

Despite all these inventions, the laurels of the discoverer still went to Alexander Graham Bell.

So, on February 14, 1876, Bell filed an application with the Washington Patent Office, and on March 7, 1876, the American received a patent. He called his device a “talking telegraph.” The Bell tube could alternately transmit and receive a signal. The American scientist’s telephone did not have a ringer; it was invented a little later, in 1878, by Thomas Watson. When someone called the subscriber, the telegraph began to whistle. The range of such a line did not exceed 500 meters.

Note that Alexander Bell was officially considered the inventor of the telephone for a long time. And only on June 11, 2002, the US Congress, in resolution No. 269, transferred this status to Antonio Meucci.

Converting a talking telegraph into a landline telephone

Bell's talking telegraph went through many metamorphoses before becoming the modern smartphone.

So, in 1877-1878. American inventor Thomas Edison improved the device. He introduced an induction coil into the circuit, and in the microphone he replaced the carbon powder with a carbon rod (such microphones were used until 1980). This made the communication clearer and louder. Now telephones, unlike public telegraphs, have become household devices.

In 1878, the first telephone exchange appeared in New Haven. The following year, Paris took over the baton. Since 1881, telephone exchanges began to open in Berlin, Riga, and Warsaw. In Russia, namely in Moscow and St. Petersburg, they appeared in 1882.

It is worth noting that the first telephone exchanges were manual - the connection was made by a telephone operator. But in 1879, American engineers Connolly and McTight invented an automatic switch. Now people could reach each other by simply dialing a number.

Beginning of the 20th century marked by a real telephone boom. All over the world there was active construction of telephone exchanges, of which there were more than 10 thousand by 1910, and long-distance lines serving more than 10 million telephones.

It turns out that in just about half a century the telephone has gone from a pipe dream of inventors and enthusiasts to the most widespread phenomenon, allowing millions of people to communicate at a distance. It is from this time that humanity can no longer imagine life without this device. But when did it start to turn into a smartphone?

The advent of mobile phones. The history of the modern smartphone

In 1969, world leaders in the telecommunications market began to think about improving the wired device. They wanted each subscriber to have their own number, which would be relevant not only in the country where it was registered, but also abroad. Stockholm Technical School graduate Esten Mäkitolo was one of the first to come up with such an idea. However, for the practical implementation of the Myakitolo concept, powerful technologies were required, which appeared only in the 1980s.

Therefore, it was only in 1983 that Motorola was able to release the world's first cell phone. Although experimental calls from a prototype were made in the 1970s.

It was a handset weighing about 0.8 kg and measuring 22.5 x 12.5 x 3.75 cm. The battery allowed communication for as long as 35 minutes, but it took a little more than 10 hours to charge it. Of course, with modern devices there is no comparison, but for that time it was a huge breakthrough.

Motorola very quickly had competitors who began to release more and more advanced and intelligent models each time. So, over time, a calculator, alarm clock, calendar, camera and many other applications and functions appeared on the phone. In the 2000s. phones began to appear with operating system what turned them into personal computers. Today, using a smartphone, you can do more than just call a friend or send a message. For him it is primitive. It can communicate with satellites, take large-scale pictures, play music, not to mention reading books, watching movies and multitasking.

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