It was believed that the first mobile phone was developed in America. Many people think so, and not only overseas, but also in our vast expanses.
At the beginning of the Cold War, the concept of a pocket phone seemed fantastic: most American companies would not have devoted a cent to its implementation. At the same time, people behind the Iron Curtain did not languish over gold, but brought fantasy to life.
So, according to the creators of the series "The Other Side of the Moon", the best friend of the pioneer would look like: a mobile phone in a wooden case with a rotary dial. In my opinion, the device is obscenely ugly.
In 1958, a note with a strange photograph appeared in the Science and Life edition. It showed a man sitting on a boat bank in the middle of the lake and talking on a real cell phone.
The LK phone (named after its creator Leonid Kupriyanovich) is not a trivial walkie-talkie for you that works only in the receive-transmit mode. We are talking about full-fledged duplex communication, when a person can simultaneously speak and hear the interlocutor.
The man in the boat is a Soviet amateur radio engineer comrade Kupriyanovich, and in his hands he has a LK-2 of his own production. This man created a mobile phone 25 years before the official release of the first Motorola Dyna-TAC.
Leonid Kupriyanovich's invention worked in almost the same way as cellular devices work in our time. The device went online through the ATR - an analogue of the base station we are used to. The difference was that the ATR unit (auto-telephone radio station) was connected in parallel with the city telephone. The radio station was an intermediate link between a mobile phone and a wired telephone network: it received the signal over the air and transmitted it further over the wires.
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The LK-1 had one significant drawback. And when I say "weighty", I literally mean its weight: it would be a stretch to call a 3-kilogram device "mobile". However, a year later, the author presented LK-2: the phone lost weight to 500 grams and the size of 2 cigarette packs. This gadget could be worn on a belt without any particular inconvenience.
LK-1 prototype in a car. A hands-free headset was originally an anachronism, and the phone book was paper.
From the first model, the author made, as they would say today, an open source project. The inventor published the telephone circuit in "Young Technique". Instead of drooling while waiting for the release of the gadget, the conscientious radio amateur could assemble a personal cell phone on his own.
The range of the LK-1 was 20-30 km, that is, the owner of the mobile phone could catch the network if there was at least one ATR receiver within these limits.
The principle is so similar to modern cellular communication that all travelers in space and time stubbornly climb into their heads. Of course, the Soviet engineer did not fly into the future, but he thought on the scale of the 21st century:
Kupriyanovich's dream is an all-Union coverage area: the inventor proposed to place receiving antennas on natural heights and roofs of urban high-rises.
LK-2, according to the author's calculations, should not have cost more than 400 rubles, about the same as a good TV. For comparison, the 1983 Dyna-TAC mobile phone with a price tag of $ 3995 was more expensive than last year's Toyota Corolla. Motorola allocated 10 years and 15 million dollars to develop the American prototype. Kupriyanovich did not know that this was possible. In 61, he put together the third concept - a pocket rotary telephone and showed this fantastic thing to correspondents.
A modest note in a provincial publication. The reader is not very interested. The reader wants to know when the Antonovka will be landed there on Mars.
The radio phone was assembled on transistors, contained a receiver and 2 transmitters, had a mass of 70 grams and a 25-kilometer radius of communication with the station. The battery was a nickel-cadmium battery. There were reports in the press about "a new model of the telephone set ready for serial production." And then - silence, and this is where the history of the LC line ended.
Did the Soviet mobile phone have a future? LK simply did not fit into the era, in the days of world-scale achievements, the pocket phone seemed like an ordinary invention. It never occurred to anyone that a mobile phone is a must have. The heads were busy with other things: after all, they recently created TOKAMAK, launched Sputnik-1, built the first nuclear power plant, completed the BAM line, and the time is not far off when the rivers will turn back.
The country lived on a different scale and needed more urgent projects than the creation of a Soviet cellular network. Become red Jobs L. I. Kupriyanov was not destined.