Some technical devices created in the Soviet Union were far ahead of their time. Unfortunately, their introduction into mass production did not happen due to the inertia and sluggishness of the state planning system. A striking example is the history of the world's first mobile phone, which in 1957 was invented and assembled by the talented Soviet radio engineer Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich.
Mobile phones
The idea of making the telephone mobile was developed by many scientists almost immediately after Alexander Bell received a patent in the USA in 1876 for a device "for transmitting speech and other sounds using electric waves. At the beginning of the 20th century, a field telephone with coils of wires was invented to quickly lay a new line. A little later, intercoms were developed, which were supposed to be connected to special sockets installed on poles along the highway. In 1939, an article was published in the American magazine "Modern Mechanix" ("Modern Mechanics") that one of the California companies intends to produce a wireless radiotelephone that can be carried everywhere. True, the device was never created in the end.
In 1943, the Soviet electrical engineer Grigory Babat in the journal "Technics for Youth" described the principles of the so-called "monophone" - a portable device for voice communication. Unfortunately, his weight would have been at least fifteen kilograms - that is, it would have been much easier to use the radio.
After the war, systems were actively created in several countries at once, allowing calls from the car. The equipment was quite cumbersome - but when it was transported in a car, this was not decisive. In 1946, such devices began to produce "American Telephone and Telegraph Company", founded by Alexander Bell. To speak, the subscriber in the car had to constantly press the button, and to listen - to release it. Such equipment became very popular - and even helped to increase sales of passenger cars. In 1948, four thousand Americans were using car telephones, and in 1964, already one and a half million.
Successful career
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Radio engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich was one of those who dealt with the problems of mobile telephony in the Soviet Union. Very little is known about his biography. He was born in Moscow in 1929, graduated from the Moscow State Technical University named after N. E. Bauman. The exact place of work was not indicated anywhere; most likely, Leonid Ivanovich worked in one of the closed institutes. Judging by the fact that in the late 1950s (that is, under the age of 30) he had a personal car, his career as an engineer was quite successful - at that time, the vast majority of Soviet citizens could only dream of their own car.
In 1957, Kupriyanovich received a patent for the LK-1 apparatus ("Leonid Kupriyanovich", the first sample), which was officially called "Device for calling and switching radiotelephone communication channels." The engineer himself called it a radio telephone.
The device consisted of two parts - a portable device and an automatic telephone radio station (ATR), which was located next to an ordinary landline telephone and served to connect the intercom to the subscriber network.
At the same time, the Asia-Pacific Region was designed for several numbers. In 1965, at the Inforga-65 exhibition, held on the territory of VDNKh, one of the Bulgarian companies presented a base station designed for 15 subscribers. It was created on the basis of the APR Leonid Kupriyanovich - and was subsequently issued for departmental communications at industrial or construction sites.
Kupriyanovich himself in an interview published in 1957 in the magazine "Behind the Wheel" (it was about communication devices installed in cars), stated: "Later, when there will be thousands of such devices, the ATP will already work not 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, forcing its own relay to work. " Thus, the radio engineer already in those years foresaw the future service of modern mobile phones, when one base station serves thousands of subscribers.
In another interview, published in the magazine "Technics for Youth" in 1959, Kupriyanovich talks about the fact that base stations will be located on high-rise buildings - nowadays this has also become the norm.
The radio phone created by Leonid Ivanovich in 1957 weighed about three kilograms. The batteries were inside the device, and their period of continuous use was up to 30 hours. The device had two antennas and a dial for dialing. Also a microphone and a headphone jack were built into the device.
For the price of a motorcycle
The radio telephone could be used up to 30 kilometers from the base station. According to Kupriyanovich's calculations, such a device should have cost from 300 to 400 rubles - the then price of a motorcycle.
Leonid Ivanovich's invention was reported in several popular scientific publications. A documentary story about a radio telephone was included in the Science and Technology newsreel, where the work of the apparatus was demonstrated at a state farm near Moscow. The device was called extremely necessary for the country - for example, when used in ambulances or for dispatch communications.
An elated radio engineer began work on improving his mobile device. A year later, in 1958, he presented a model that weighed six times less - about 500 grams (the first cell phones released in the United States for sale in the early 1980s were 200 grams or more heavier). The new apparatus had the dimensions of two packs of cigarettes folded together. Instead of headphones and a microphone, an ordinary telephone receiver was used, the wire from which was attached to the device.
In 1961, the inventor introduced another model of the radio phone - it fit in the palm of your hand and weighed only 70 grams. The size of the device resembled a modern mobile phone, though without a display and not with buttons, but with a small dial for dialing a number. In this case, the device could communicate with a base station at a distance of up to 80 kilometers. In an interview with the Novosti Press Agency (APN), Kupriyanovich said that this version of the radio was prepared for serial production at one of the Soviet enterprises, and also said: “To serve a city like Moscow with radio communication, you will need only ten automatic telephone radio stations. The first of these stations has been designed in the new metropolitan area "Mazilovo".
Conflict of interest
Why did the Soviet mobile phone remain a prototype? One can only guess about this.
It is possible that the device was classified - and it was used as spy equipment. But it is much more likely that the work on the introduction of the radio telephone into mass production was curtailed due to a conflict of departmental interests.
At the end of the 1950s, the Altai communication system was developed in the USSR, designed to install telephones in cars. They have already begun to test it in the cars of the special services and the party and economic nomenclature. The fact that the device weighed from five to seven kilograms did not play a special role. The main thing is that for this communication system to work outside the cities, it was necessary to install line stations only along the main roads and at a distance of 60 to 80 kilometers. This, of course, looked much more real than the deployed network of radio stations. Officials liked the new system, but for ordinary citizens mobile services were considered a luxury. So the devices and stations of the Altai system were launched into production - and they no longer remembered Kupriyanovich's invention.
Walking around Manhattan
Since the beginning of the 1960s, the radio engineer himself switched to work on creating the latest medical technology. In particular, he created the Ritmoson device, which controlled the modes of sleep and wakefulness of a person. There is information that the scientific and technical developments of Kupriyanovich were used to treat the top leaders of the state.
Many publications indicate that the first conversation on a cell phone took place in New York in 1973, when the head of the communications department of Motorola, Martin Cooper, strolling through downtown Manhattan, called a high-ranking employee of rival Bell Laboratories, Joel Engel, and said that speaks from a portable cordless telephone, and in response he heard a gnashing of teeth. The apparat was called "DynaTAC", it weighed a little more than a kilogram, there were twelve keys on its panel - ten numeric and two for sending a call and ending communication. There was no display, the device worked in the talk mode for 35 minutes, and it took about ten hours to charge it.
Only a few years later, a screen appeared on the trial model of the device, which displayed the dialed number, as well as nine special keys for redoing a call, locking the device, increasing or decreasing the volume, etc.
As you can see, the first American mobile phone was inferior to Kupriyanovich's device both in weight and functionally, although it was created 15 years later. But it was he who was destined to become the prototype of modern cell phones.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №47. Author: Elina Pogonina