The Incredible Story Of Cell Phones

Do you remember when no one had cell phones? How did you tell your friends you'd be late? How'd you tell others where to come find you? How'd you figure out where everyone else was?

Looking around nowadays, it's easy to forget that it wasn't very long ago when almost no one had a cell phone. Going through the cell phone reviews on ProductCritic, it amazes me how far the technology has come in such a relatively short time....especially when you see phones like the Blackberry Pearl or the Nokia 7390 with their huge list of features and functions. The Nokia 7390 has a pretty good 3 megapixel camera included. My first digital camera, the Canon G1 was 3.1 megapixel and it was one of the top-end "prosumer" cameras at that time!

AmericanHeritage.com has a great article detailing the story of the creation of the first "hand-held portable phone" by Motorola. It's a pretty fascinating tale and, as with most good stories, it's about overcoming some incredibly massive challenges (due to a FCC meeting deadline, they had to create the phone in six weeks!) and coming out winners in the end.

I've included a picture of some of their prototypes (image taken from the AmericanHeritage site). It's actually amazing that you can recognize current cell phone form factors in those early prototypes.

The engineers working on this first cell phone for Motorola were definitely pioneers of the first order. I love this exchange that's documented in the article when they first unveiled the prototype and the project to a group of engineers:

“Eyes opened and jaws dropped, because it was really small,” Krolopp remembers. Cooper issued a challenge: “Anybody who doesn’t believe that this can’t be done in time, get up and leave the room.” “With the kind of egos we had in the room,” Krolopp says, “no one got up.”

To the inner-geek in me, that's just awesome. So, stop taking for granted that little phone, camera, mp3 player, clock, browser, pda, and notebook that's in your pocket/purse and read the article to get more appreciation for something that many people can no longer live without.