ColdFusion - Who Invented the First Mobile Phone?

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Cold Fusion TV. Hey, welcome to another Cold Fusion video. Looking through all of history, it would seem that the mobile phone has caused the most rapid changes in daily life ever seen. Phones have altered our expectations of what's possible and even our mental process. Now we expect to have all things with us at all times in our pocket. The entire world is at our fingertips, instantly. We even tend to perceive time in such a way where a few seconds is an eternity. If a phone takes more than a few seconds to boot up and snap the perfect shot, that's just not good enough.

Starting point is 00:00:42 We are able to read, watch, listen to, consume, and sometimes even create from anywhere at any time. What I've just described is the smartphone revolution, and it's only a decade old. Before the smartphone in the 2000s and 90s, phones were a lot less than this. They just made phone calls, had a basic organizer, and in latter years, a modest camera and very basic internet if you were lucky. But go back into the 1980s and mobile phones just did one thing, make phone calls. But the question is, what was the first one of these primitive phones that just made phone calls? What was the original phone that would become the grandfather to all the billions of phones in our pockets? Where did it come from? Who invented it? And what's the story

Starting point is 00:01:27 behind it? In this video, we'll take a look. This video is brought to you by Squarespace, one of the easiest ways to make a website. I'm building. a Coldfusion website now and if you have a suggestion for what you would like to see on the website, let me know below. If you want to make your own website, go to squarespace.com slash cold fusion to get 10% off your first purchase. To start the story of the first mobile phone, we have to go back to the 1960s. Technically at this time, mobile phones did exist but only in cars and if you had one, you were the boss of the town, a real high flyer. As it turns out, since the 1940s, phones had enjoyed limited use in large cities of the United States. Putting a phone in a vehicle

Starting point is 00:02:12 was the only way to make the mobile. This is because the phones took so much power to run that only car batteries could supply it. Another drawback was that for a given area, only 12 channels existed, so most of the time you'd have to wait to use a network. Just to connect to a call could take 30 minutes. That's just the way it was and the way it always will be. Until 1968, that is. In this year, the Federal Communications Commission asked AT&T to fix this issue. AT&T then came up with a cellular architecture. Its aim was to break up the large areas of coverage into smaller ones so that multiple people could use their phones in their cars at the same time.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Regular mobile systems use a central high-power transmitter to serve an entire city. But this way, only one telephone call can be handled on a radio voice path at one time. Amps makes many more radio channels available at one time to many more customers by using a number of low-power transmitters. Each transmitter is the heart of its own separate area or cell. As a vehicle drives from one cell to another, advanced electronic equipment at a central location called a mobile telephone switching office automatically transfers the call by telephone line to another cell without the caller knowing it. If I didn't have my phone, it would be disaster. I don't know what I'd do, really. I'd be back to coming off the tollways, looking for a phone,

Starting point is 00:03:38 customers yelling, screaming, where are you? Why haven't you called? Why don't you care? Around the same time, Motorola had a car phone division and didn't want AT&T to have a monopoly on products that could take advantage of this new system. Motorola feared that this would be the end of their mobile business if they didn't do anything, so they decided to develop a phone to utilize this new cell technology and asked a man by the name of Martin Cooper to spearhead the project. In 1972, he got started. The thing was, there was a lot of risk here,

Starting point is 00:04:07 because at the time, Motorola didn't really have the capital to absorb any failures. If they spent a whole bunch of money on this project, and it failed, it could spell the end for Motorola. AT&T, on the other hand, were giants. They could throw as much money as they wanted without wearing. It was David versus Goliath. One day, while thinking about this problem, Martin Cooper recalled a comic strip called Dick Tracy.

Starting point is 00:04:32 It usually involves the main character talking into a mobile wristwatch. Here's an ad from the 1960s depicting a toy version of the watch. Tracy to kids. Come in, kids. It's here at last, the new Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio that keeps you in constant touch with your buddies. Broadcast from room to room and even house to house. No wires needed, yet voices travel back and forth. Radio on the open road from one bike to another. or went out hiking.

Starting point is 00:05:04 This gave Martin an idea and he began to think about the problem differently. Why assign a number to a desk, a home, a building, a car or even a place at all? Why not assign it to a person? You could be connected wherever you are to whoever you wanted.

Starting point is 00:05:19 This was a revolutionary idea. With this thought, Cooper defied the industry's narrow vision of car phones and went for the idea of a personal, portable form of communication. Now that he had the vision, all he had to do was set his team up to build it. But could this even be done? Nobody knew.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Martin was banking on a brand new technology that could make this vision a reality, the microprocessor. It was a tiny chip that could do the same thing as many car phone components with much less space and much less power consumption. Surprisingly, by March of 73, Cooper and his team had a working prototype. On April 3rd, 1973, Martin introduced the Dinatac phone at a press conference in New York City. To make sure that his phone actually worked before the press conference, he decided to place the very first public cell phone call. He decided to call an engineer called Joel Engel. He was the head of AT&T's rival project. So Martin simply called Joel just to tell them that he'd beaten them to the mobile phone.

Starting point is 00:06:24 In that first call, we didn't know it was going to be historic in any way at all. worried about one thing. Is the phone going to work when we turn it on? Fortunately it did. In 1983, after years of development, Motorola introduced the first portable cell phone to consumers. It was the Dinatac 8,000X. It almost weighed one kilogram and was absolutely huge because it needed so much battery to power it. Despite all of that battery, a full charge took roughly 10 hours and it offered only 30 minutes of torque time. And to top it all off, its price was almost $10,000 adjusted for inflation. So when you hear all of that, you're probably thinking that this mobile phone product was a failure. Well, actually, far from it.

Starting point is 00:07:09 As it turns out, the value of talking anywhere at any time made the cost worth it. And the phone eventually became a success, kicking off the mobile phone revolution. When Martin made the first mobile phone call back in 1973, there was only one real cell phone. Now, there are more mobile phones than people. So what's Martin up to today? At age 88, he sits on committees supporting the Federal Communications Commission and the United States Department of Commerce. So that's the story of who invented the very first mobile phone.

Starting point is 00:07:43 I say good on Martin for taking the risk and thinking outside the box. He literally changed the world and all of our lives. Anyway, that was just a quick little piece of history. Thanks for watching. Feel free to subscribe if you've just stumbled across this channel. This has been Degogo, you've been watching Cold Fusion and I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Cheers guys, have a good one. Cold Fusion, it's new thinking.

ColdFusion - Who Invented the First Mobile Phone?

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