There is a legend about how people first saw a mobile phone. It happened in the USA on April 3, 1973. The director of the mobile communications department of Motorola, Martin Cooper, walking around Manhattan, defiantly called his mobile phone, which was very surprised by passers-by who saw this. And somehow it became customary to consider the USA as the homeland of the mobile phone. But this is not the case.
In fact, the first mobile phone appeared in the Soviet Union. Its creator was the Soviet radio engineer and popularizer of radio engineering Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich. The prototype of the portable automatic duplex mobile radiotelephone LK-1, created by him, was tested on April 9, 1957.
The first Soviet radiotelephone LK-1.
In 1958, Kupriyanovich created improved models of the apparatus, which was the size of a box of Kazbek cigarettes and together with a power source weighed half a kilogram. A pocket phone allowed not only to call any subscriber, but also to receive calls from both home phones and street machines.
The first nationwide national telephone communication system was the Soviet system "Altai", which was put into trial operation in 1963. The Altai system initially operated at a frequency of 150 MHz, but by 1970 the Altai system was operating in 114 cities of the USSR and a 330 MHz band was allocated for it. In Voronezh, this system operated until the end of 2011 and was closed for economic reasons. to date, the Altai system operates in Novosibirsk.
The mobile phone was first put on sale by Travel Electronics in 1979. It weighed 907 grams and cost $ 3,895 at the time, which was roughly the price of an average car. Thus, the first cell phone cost more than the then Toyota Corola, which was sold in the US for $ 3698. The subscription fee was $ 50 a month, and one minute of conversation cost users from 24 to 40 cents, that is, it was equal to the cost of a whole gallon of gasoline (3.78541178 liters).
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