Usually the story of the creation of a mobile phone is told something like this.
On April 3, 1973, Motorola's head of mobile communications, Martin Cooper, strolling through downtown Manhattan, decided to call his cell phone. The mobile phone was called Dyna-TAC and looked like a brick, which weighed over a kilogram, and only worked half an hour of talk time.
Prior to that, the son of the founder of Motorola, Robert Gelvin, who in those days was the executive director of this company, allocated 15 million dollars and gave subordinates 10 years to create a device that the user can carry with him. The first working sample appeared just a couple of months later. The success of Martin Cooper, who came to the firm in 1954 as an ordinary engineer, was facilitated by the fact that since 1967 he was engaged in the development of portable radios. They also led to the idea of a mobile phone.
It is believed that up to this point, other mobile telephones that a person can carry with them, like a watch or a notebook, did not exist. There were walkie-talkies, there were "mobile" telephones that could be used in a car or train, but there was no such thing to just walk down the street.
Moreover, until the early 1960s, many companies generally refused to conduct research on the creation of cellular communications, because they came to the conclusion that, in principle, it was impossible to create a compact cellular telephone. And none of the specialists of these companies paid attention to the fact that on the other side of the "iron curtain" in popular science magazines, photographs began to appear where … a person talking on a mobile phone was depicted. (For those in doubt, the numbers of the magazines where the pictures were published will be given, so that everyone can make sure that this is not a graphic editor).
Hoax? Joke? Propaganda? An attempt to misinform Western electronics manufacturers (this industry, as you know, was of strategic military importance)? Maybe we are just talking about an ordinary walkie-talkie? However, further searches led to a completely unexpected conclusion - Martin Cooper was not the first person in history to call on a mobile phone.
And not even the second.
Engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich demonstrates the capabilities of a mobile phone. Science and Life, 10, 1958.
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The person in the picture from Science and Life magazine was named Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich, and it was he who turned out to be the person who made a mobile phone call 15 years before Cooper. But before we talk about it, let's remember that the basic principles of mobile communications have a very, very long history.
In fact, attempts to make the phone mobile appeared soon after its inception. Field telephones with coils were created for quick line laying, attempts were made to quickly provide communication from the car, throwing wires on the line running along the highway or plugging into an outlet on a pole. Of all this, only field telephones are relatively widespread (in one of the mosaics of the Kievskaya metro station in Moscow, modern passengers sometimes mistake a field telephone for a mobile phone and laptop).
It was only after the advent of radio communications in the VHF range that it became possible to ensure genuine mobility of telephone communications. By the 30s, transmitters appeared that a person could easily carry on their backs or hold in their hands - in particular, they were used by the American radio company NBC for operational reporting from the scene. However, connections with automatic telephone exchanges were not yet provided by such means of communication.
Portable VHF transmitter. "Radiofront", 16, 1936.
During the Great Patriotic War, Soviet scientist and inventor Georgy Ilyich Babat in besieged Leningrad proposed the so-called "monophone" - an automatic radiotelephone operating in the centimeter range of 1000-2000 MHz (now the GSM standard uses frequencies of 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 Hz), number which is encoded in the telephone itself, equipped with an alphabetic keypad and also has the functions of a voice recorder and an answering machine. "It weighs no more than a Leica film apparatus" - wrote G. Babat in his article "Monophone" in the magazine "Tekhnika-Molodezhi" No. 7-8 for 1943: "Wherever the subscriber is - at home, on a visit or at work, in the foyer of a theater, on the tribune of a stadium, watching the competition - everywhere he can plug his individual monophone into one of the many endings of the wave network branches.and no matter how many there are, they will not interfere with each other. " Due to the fact that the principles of cellular communication had not yet been invented by that time, Babat suggested using an extensive network of microwave waveguides to connect mobile phones with a base station.
G. Babat, who proposed the idea of a mobile phone.
In December 1947, employees of the American firm Bell Douglas Ring and Ray Young proposed the principle of hexagonal cells for mobile telephony. This happened in the midst of active attempts to create a telephone with which you can make calls from the car. The first such service was launched in 1946 in St. Louis by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1947 a system with intermediate stations along the highway was launched, allowing calls from a car on the way from New York to Boston. However, due to imperfection and high cost, these systems have not been commercially successful. In 1948, another American telephone company in Richmond was able to establish an auto-dial car radio telephone service, which was already better. The weight of the equipment of such systems was tens of kilograms and it was placed in the trunk,so that an inexperienced person did not have the thought of a pocket version of looking at it.
Domestic car radiotelephone. Radio, 1947, no. 5.
Nevertheless, as it was noted in the same 1946 in the journal "Science and Life", No. 10, domestic engineers G. Shapiro and I. Zakharchenko developed a telephone communication system from a moving car with an urban network, the mobile device of which had a capacity of only 1 watt and fit under the instrument panel. It was powered by a car battery.
The telephone number assigned to the car was connected to the radio set at the city telephone exchange. To call a city subscriber, it was necessary to turn on the device in the car, which was sending its callsigns on the air. They were perceived by the base station on the city automatic telephone exchange and the telephone set was immediately turned on, which worked like a regular telephone. When calling the car, the city subscriber dialed the number, this activated the base station, the signal of which was perceived by the device on the car.
As you can see from the description, this system was something like a radio tube. In the course of experiments carried out in 1946 in Moscow, a range of the apparatus of over 20 km was achieved, and a conversation with Odessa was carried out with excellent audibility. Later, the inventors worked to increase the radius of the base station to 150 km.
It was expected that the telephone system of Shapiro and Zakharchenko would be widely used in the work of fire brigades, air defense units, police, emergency medical and technical assistance. However, further information about the development of the system did not appear. It can be assumed that it was considered more expedient for the emergency services to use their own departmental communication systems than to use the GTS.
Alfred Gross could have been the creator of the first mobile phone.
In the United States, the first to try to do the impossible was the inventor Alfred Gross. Since 1939, he was fond of creating portable radios, which decades later were called "walkie-talkies". In 1949, he created a device based on a walkie-talkie, which he called a "wireless remote telephone." The device could be carried with you, and it gave the owner a signal to come to the phone. It is believed that this was the first simple pager. Gross even implemented it in one of the hospitals in New York, but the telephone companies showed no interest in this new product, or in his other ideas in this direction. So America lost the chance to become the home of the first practical mobile phone.
However, these ideas were developed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USSR. So, one of those who continued their search in the field of mobile communications in our country turned out to be Leonid Kupriyanovich. The press at that time reported very little about his personality. It was known that he lived in Moscow, his activities were sparingly characterized by the press as "radio engineer" or "radio amateur". It is also known that Kupriyanovich could be considered a successful person by that time - in the early 60s he had a car.
The consonance of the names of Kupriyanovich and Cooper is only the initial link in a chain of strange coincidences in the fate of these individuals. Kupriyanovich, like Cooper and Gross, also started with miniature walkie-talkies - he has been making them since the mid-50s, and many of his designs are striking even now - both in their dimensions and in their simplicity and originality of solutions. The tube radio, which he created in 1955, weighed as much as the first transistorized walkie-currents of the early 1960s.
Pocket radio by Kupriyanovich 1955.
In 1957, Kupriyanovich demonstrated an even more amazing thing - a walkie-talkie the size of a matchbox and weighing only 50 grams (together with power supplies), which can work without changing the power supply for 50 hours and provides communication at a distance of two kilometers - quite matched to the products of the 21st century. which can be seen in the windows of the current communication salons (picture from the magazine UT, 3, 1957). As evidenced by the publication in UT, 12, 1957, mercury or manganese batteries were used in this radio station.
At the same time, Kupriyanovich not only did without microcircuits, which were simply not there at that time, but also used miniature lamps together with transistors. In 1957 and 1960, the first and second editions of his book for radio amateurs were published, with the promising title "Pocket Radios".
The 1960 edition describes a simple radio with only three transistors that can be worn on the wrist - almost like the famous walkie-talkie clock from the movie "Off Season." The author suggested it to tourists and mushroom pickers for repetition, but in life, mainly students showed interest in this design by Kupriyanovich - for tips on exams, which even became part of an episode of Gaidaev's comedy "Operation Y".
Kupriyanovich's wrist radio.
And, just like Cooper, pocket walkie-talkies led Kupriyanovich to make a radiotelephone from which one could call any city telephone set, and which one could take with you wherever you go. The pessimistic sentiments of foreign firms could not stop a person who knew how to make walkie-talkies from a matchbox.
In 1957 L. I. Kupriyanovich received an inventor's certificate for "Radiofon" - an automatic radiotelephone with direct dialing. Through an automatic telephone radio station from this device it was possible to connect to any subscriber of the telephone network within the range of the Radiofon transmitter. By that time, the first operating set of equipment was also ready, demonstrating the principle of operation of the "Radiofon", named by the inventor of the LK-1 (Leonid Kupriyanovich, the first sample).
LK-1 by our standards was still difficult to call a mobile phone, but it made a great impression on contemporaries. "The telephone set is small in size, its weight does not exceed three kilograms," wrote Science and Life. “The batteries are placed inside the body of the apparatus; the period of their continuous use is 20-30 hours. LK-1 has 4 special radio tubes, so that the power delivered by the antenna is sufficient for communication on short waves in the distance of 20-30 kilometers. The device has 2 antennas; its front panel has 4 call switches, a microphone (outside of which headphones are connected) and a dial for dialing."
Copyright certificate 115494 dated 1.11.1957
Just as in a modern cell phone, Kupriyanovich's apparatus was connected to the city telephone network through a base station (the author called it ATR - automatic telephone radio station), which received signals from mobile phones into a wired network and transmitted from the wired network to mobile phones. 50 years ago, the principles of a mobile phone were described for inexperienced cleaners simply and figuratively: "The ATR connection with any subscriber is the same as with a regular phone, only we control its work from a distance."
To operate a mobile phone with a base station, four communication channels were used at four frequencies: two channels were used for transmitting and receiving sound, one for dialing and one for hanging up.
The first mobile phone of Kupriyanovich. ("Science and Life, 8, 1957"). On the right - base station.
The reader may suspect that LK-1 was a simple radio handset for a telephone. But it turns out this is not the case. "The question involuntarily arises: will not several LK-1 operating simultaneously interfere with each other?" - writes all the same Science and Life. “No, since in this case different tonal frequencies are used for the device, forcing their relays to work on ATR (tone frequencies will be transmitted on the same wavelength). Frequencies of transmission and reception of sound for each device will be different in order to avoid their mutual influence."
Thus, in LK-1 there was a number coding in the telephone set itself, and not depending on the wire line, which allows it with good reason to be considered as the first mobile phone. True, judging by the description, this coding was very primitive, and the number of subscribers who could work through one ATR turned out to be very limited at first. In addition, in the first demonstrator, the ATR was simply connected to a regular telephone parallel to an existing subscriber point - this made it possible to start experiments without making changes to the city automatic telephone exchange, but made it difficult to simultaneously "enter the city" from several tubes. However, in 1957, the LK-1 existed in only one more copy.
Using the first mobile phone was not as convenient as it is now. ("UT, 7, 1957")
Nevertheless, the practical possibility of implementing a wearable mobile phone and organizing a service for such a mobile communication at least in the form of departmental switches has been proven. "The range of the device … several tens of kilometers." - Leonid Kupriyanovich writes in a note for the July issue of the magazine "Young Technician" in 1957. "If there is only one receiving device within these limits, this will be enough to talk with any of the city's residents who have a telephone, and for as many kilometers." “Radiotelephones … can be used in vehicles, airplanes and ships. Passengers will be able to call home, to work, book a hotel room from the airplane. It will be used by tourists, builders, hunters, etc.”.
Comic strip in UT magazine, 7, 1957: Taunton from the Moscow Festival calls his family in Paris on his mobile phone. Now this will surprise no one.
In addition, Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would be able to supplant the phones embedded in cars. At the same time, the young inventor immediately used something like a “hands free” headset. a speakerphone was used instead of an earpiece. In an interview with M. Melgunova, published in the magazine "Za Rulem", 12, 1957, Kupriyanovich planned to introduce mobile phones in two stages. “In the beginning, while there are few radiotelephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near the home phone of a motorist. But later, when there will be thousands of such devices, the ATR 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 relay to work. " Thus, Kupriyanovich essentiallypositioned two types of household appliances at once - simple radio tubes, which were easier to launch into production, and a mobile phone service, in which one base station serves thousands of subscribers.
Kupriyanovich with LK-1 in the car. To the right of the machine - loudspeaker. "Behind the wheel", 12, 1957
One may wonder how accurately Kupriyanovich, more than half a century ago, imagined how widely the mobile phone would enter our daily life.
“Taking such a radio phone with you, you are essentially taking an ordinary telephone set, but without wires,” he will write a couple of years later. “Wherever you are, you can always be found by phone, you only need to dial the known number of your radio phone from any city phone (even from a pay phone). The phone rings in your pocket and you start a conversation. If necessary, you can dial any city phone number directly from the tram, trolleybus, bus, call an ambulance, fire or emergency vehicles, contact your home …"
It is hard to believe that these words were written by a person who has not been in the 21st century. However, for Kupriyanovich there was no need to travel to the future. He built it.
Block diagram of a simplified version of LK-1
In 1958, Kupryanovich, at the request of radio amateurs, published in the February issue of the magazine "Young Technician" a simplified design of the device, the ATR of which can work with only one radio tube and does not have the function of long-distance calls.
Schematic diagram of a simplified version of the LK-1
Differential transformer circuit.
Using such a mobile phone was somewhat more difficult than using modern ones. Before calling the subscriber, it was necessary, in addition to the receiver, to turn on the transmitter on the “receiver”. Hearing a long phone beep in the earpiece and making the appropriate switch, it was possible to proceed to dialing the number. But all the same, it was more convenient than at the radio stations of that time, since there was no need to switch from reception to transmission and end each phrase with the word "Reception!" At the end of the conversation, the load transmitter turned off by itself to save batteries.
Publishing a description in a magazine for youth, Kupriyanovich was not afraid of competition. By this time, he already had a new model of the apparatus, which at that time could be considered revolutionary.
LK-1 and base station. UT, 2, 1958
A 1958 mobile phone with a power source weighed only 500 grams.
This weight line was again taken by the world technical thought only … on March 6, 1983, i.e. a quarter of a century later. True, Kupriyanovich's model was not so elegant and was a box with toggle switches and a round dialer dial, to which an ordinary telephone receiver was connected on a wire. It turned out that during the conversation, either both hands were occupied, or the box had to be hung on the belt. On the other hand, it was much more convenient to hold a light plastic tube from a household phone in your hands than a device with the weight of an army pistol (According to Martin Cooper, using a mobile phone helped him build muscles well).
According to Kupriyanovich's calculations, his apparatus should have cost 300-400 Soviet rubles. It was equal to the cost of a good television or a light motorcycle; at such a price, the device would be affordable, of course, not to every Soviet family, but quite a few could save up for it if they wanted. Commercial mobile phones of the early 80s with a price of 3500-4000 US dollars were also not affordable for all Americans - the millionth subscriber appeared only in 1990.
According to LI Kupriyanovich in his article, published in the February issue of the journal "Tekhnika-molodezh" for 1959, now on one wavelength it was possible to place up to a thousand communication channels of radio phones with the Asia-Pacific Region. For this, the number coding in the radio telephone was carried out in a pulsed manner, and during a conversation, the signal was compressed using a device, which the author of the radio telephone called a correlator. As described in the same article, the correlator was based on the vocoder principle - splitting the speech signal into several frequency ranges, compressing each range and then recovering it at the receiving point. True, voice recognition should have deteriorated in this case, but with the quality of the then wire connection, this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing the APR on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees installed a base station fifteen years later on the top of a 50-story building in New York). And judging by the phrase "pocket radio phones made by the author of this article", we can conclude that in 1959 Kupriyanovich made at least two experimental mobile phones.
The 1958 device was already more like mobile phones.
"So far, there are only prototypes of the new apparatus, but there is no doubt that it will soon become widespread in transport, in the city telephone network, in industry, at construction sites, etc." writes Kupriyanovich in the journal "Science and Life" in August 1957. However, three years later, any publications about the further fate of the development, threatening to make a revolution in communications, disappear in the press. Moreover, the inventor himself does not disappear anywhere; for example, in the February issue of "UT" for 1960 he publishes a description of a radio station with an automatic call and a range of 40-50 km, and in the January issue of the same "Technology for Youth" for 1961 - a popular article on microelectronic technologies, in which there is never a mention of a radiophone.
All this is so strange and unusual that it involuntarily prompts the thought: was there really a working radio telephone?
Skeptics first of all draw attention to the fact that the sensational fact of the first telephone calls was not covered in the publications that popular science publications devoted to the radio telephone. It is also impossible to determine precisely from the photographs whether the inventor is calling on his mobile phone, or simply posing. Hence the version arises: yes, there was an attempt to create a mobile phone, but technically the device could not be completed, so they did not write about it anymore. However, let us ponder the question: why should journalists of the 50s consider a call a separate event worthy of mention in the press? “So does that mean, telephone? Not bad, not bad. And it turns out that you can also call on it? This is just a miracle! I would never have believed it!"
Common sense suggests that not a single Soviet popular science magazine would write about an inoperative design in 1957-1959. Such magazines already had something to write about. Satellites fly in space. Physicists have established that the cascade hyperon decays into a lambda null particle and a negative pi meson. The sound technicians restored the original sound of Lenin's voice. You can get from Moscow to Khabarovsk thanks to the TU-104 in 11 hours 35 minutes. Computers translate from one language to another and play chess. Construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station has begun Schoolchildren from the Chkalovskaya station made a robot that sees and speaks. Against the background of these events, the creation of a mobile phone is not a sensation at all. Readers are waiting for video phones! “Telephones with screens can be built even today,our technique is strong enough "- they write in the same" TM "… in 1956. “Millions of TV viewers are waiting for the radio engineering industry to start producing color TV sets … It’s high time to think about television broadcasting by wire (cable TV - OI)” - we read in the same issue. And here, you know, the mobile is somehow outdated, even without a video camera and a color display. Well, who would have written at least half a word about her if she did not work?
Then why did the “first bell” come to be considered a sensation? The answer is simple: Martin Cooper wanted it that way. On April 3, 1973, he carried out a PR campaign. For Motorola to be able to obtain permission to use radio frequencies for civilian mobile communications from the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC), it was necessary to somehow show that mobile communications did have a future. Moreover, the competitors claimed the same frequencies. And it is no coincidence that Martin Cooper's first call, according to his own story to the San Francisco Chronicle, was addressed to a rival: “It was one guy from AT&T who promoted phones for cars. His name was Joel Angel. I called him and told him that I was calling from the street, from a real "manual" cell phone. I don't remember what he said. But you know I heardhow his teeth grind."
In 1957 - 1959, Kupriyanovich did not need to share frequencies with a competing company and listen to their teeth grinding on a mobile phone. He did not even need to catch up and overtake America, due to the absence of other participants in the race. Like Cooper, Kupriyanovich also carried out PR campaigns, as was customary in the USSR. He came to the editorial offices of popular science publications, demonstrated devices, and wrote articles about them himself. It is quite possible that the letters "YT" in the name of the first device are a trick to interest the editors of "Young Technician" to place its publication. For incomprehensible circumstances, the topic of the radio was bypassed only by the country's leading radio amateur magazine - "Radio", as, incidentally, all other designs of Kupriyanovich - except for a pocket radio in 1955.
Did Kupriyanovich himself have any motives to show an inoperative apparatus - for example, to achieve success or recognition? In the publications of the 50s, the inventor's place of work is not indicated; the media present him to readers as a "radio amateur" or "engineer". However, it is known that Leonid Ivanovich lived and worked in Moscow, he was awarded the degree of candidate of technical sciences, later he worked at the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR and in the early 60s had a car (for which, by the way, he himself created a radiotelephone and anti-theft radio signaling) … In other words, by Soviet standards, he was successful for people. Doubters can also check out a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including one adapted for young technicians, the LK-1. It follows from all this that the cell phone was built and worked in 1958.
Altai-1 ″ at the end of the 50s looked like a more realistic project than pocket mobile phones.
Unlike Kupriyanovich's radio telephone, Altai had specific customers on whom the allocation of funds depended. In addition, the main problem in the implementation of both projects was not at all to create a portable device, but in the need for significant investments and time in the creation of communication infrastructure and its debugging and costs for its maintenance. When deploying "Altai", for example, in Kiev the output lamps of the transmitters were out of order, in Tashkent there were problems due to poor-quality installation of the equipment of the base stations. As the magazine "Radio" wrote, in 1968 the Altai system was deployed only in Moscow and Kiev, next in line were Samarkand, Tashkent, Donetsk and Odessa.
In the Altai system, it was easier to provide coverage of the terrain, because the subscriber could move away from the central base station at a distance of up to 60 km, and outside the city there were enough linear stations located along the roads for 40-60 km. Eight transmitters served up to 500-800 subscribers, and the transmission quality was comparable only to digital communication. The implementation of this project looked more realistic than the deployment of a national cellular network based on Radiofon.
Nevertheless, the idea of a mobile phone, despite the apparent untimeliness, was not buried at all. There were also industrial samples of the apparatus!
Western European countries also attempted to establish mobile communications prior to Cooper's historic call. So, on April 11, 1972, i.e. a year earlier, British firm Pye Telecommunications showed at Communications Today, Tomorrow and the Future at London's Royal Lancaster Hotel, a portable mobile phone that could be used to dial into the city's telephone network.
The mobile phone consisted of a Pocketphone 70 radio, used by the police, and an attachment - a handset with a push-button dialing that could be held in hand. The phone worked in the range of 450-470 MHz, judging by the data of the Pocketphone 70 radio, it could have up to 12 channels and was powered from a 15 V source.
There is also information about the existence in France in the 60s of a mobile phone with semi-automatic switching of subscribers. The digits of the dialed number were displayed on decatrons at the base station, after which the telephone operator manually switched. There is no exact data on why such a strange dialing system was adopted at the moment, we can only assume that the possible reason was errors in transferring the number, which the telephone operator eliminated.
Mobile phone of the British company Pye Telecommunications, April 11, 1972
But back to the fate of Kupriyanovich. In the 60s, he moved away from creating radio stations and switched to a new direction, lying at the intersection of electronics and medicine - the use of cybernetics to expand the capabilities of the human brain. He publishes popular articles on hypnopedia - methods of teaching a person in a dream, and in 1970 his book “Reserves for improving memory. Cybernetic Aspects”, in which, in particular, he considers the problems of“recording”information into the subconscious during a special“sleep at the informational level”. To put a person into a state of such a dream, Kupriyanovich creates the Ritmoson apparatus, and puts forward the idea of a new service - mass training of people in sleep by telephone, and the biocurrents of people through a central computer control sleep devices.
But even this idea of Kupriyanovich remains unrealized, and in his book "Biological Rhythms and Sleep" published in 1973, the apparatus "Ritmoson" is mainly positioned as a device for correcting sleep disorders. The reasons, perhaps, should be sought in the phrase from the "Reserves for improving memory": "The task of improving memory is to solve the problem of controlling consciousness, and through it, to a large extent, and the subconscious." A person in a state of sleep at the informational level, in principle, can write into memory not only foreign words for memorization, but also advertising slogans, background information designed for unconscious perception, and the person is not able to control this process, and may not even remember whether he is in such a dream state. There are too many moral and ethical problems here, and the current human society is clearly not ready for the massive use of such technologies.
Other pioneers of mobile communications have also changed the subject of work.
By the end of the war, Georgy Babat concentrated on his other idea - transport powered by microwave radiation, made more than a hundred inventions, became a doctor of sciences, was awarded the Stalin Prize, and also became famous as the author of science fiction works.
Alfred Gross went on to work as Microwave and Communications Specialist for Sperry and General Electric. He continued to create until his death at the age of 82.
Hristo Bachvarov in 1967 took up the system of radio synchronization of city clocks, for which he received two gold medals at the Leipzig Fair, headed the Institute of Radioelectronics, was awarded by the country's leadership for other developments. Later he switched to high-frequency ignition systems in automobile engines.
Martin Cooper is the CEO of ArrayComm, a small, private firm that markets its own fast wireless Internet technology.
Instead of an epilogue. 30 years after the creation of LK-1, on April 9, 1987, at the KALASTAJATORPPA hotel in Helsinki (Finland), General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Mikhail Gorbachev made a mobile call to the USSR Ministry of Communications in the presence of Nokia Vice President Stefan Widomski. So the mobile phone turned into a means of influencing the minds of politicians - just like the first satellite in the days of Khrushchev. Although, unlike a satellite, a working mobile phone was not really an indicator of technical superiority - the same Khrushchev had the opportunity to call on it …
"Wait!" - the reader will object. "So who should be considered the creator of the first mobile phone - Cooper, Kupriyanovich, Bachvarov?"
It seems that it makes no sense to contrast the results of the work here. Economic opportunities for mass use of the new service developed only by 1990.
It is possible that there were other attempts to create a wearable mobile phone that were ahead of their time, and mankind will someday remember about them.
Oleg Izmerov