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Without his smartphone it is doubtful Woolley could have lived
long enough to be rescued. This versatile device, even when it
could not function as a telephone, could nevertheless be a cam-
era, a flashlight, a medical adviser, and hundreds of other useful
things. It took a number of intertwining technologies to finally put
this tiny but powerful machine in people’s pockets and purses.
The First Mobile Telephones
Around the time of World War II people had radio telephones, in-
cluding backpack-sized radios and slightly smaller walkie-talkies.
These were not like modern cell phones. Users could only con-
nect to a single other device or to a base station that connected
to a limited number of subscribers.
Later in the 1940s the first mobile telephones began to be in-
stalled in cars, and they were connected through AT&T’s Mobile
Telephone Service. All calls had to be made through an operator,
and only a few connections could be made at a time. Car phones
were very expensive and were considered to be a status sym-
bol for executives and a few other people
who had to be able to communicate while
on the road.
About ten years later the noted sci-
ence fiction writer and futurist Arthur C.
Clarke wrote an article in which he envi-
sioned “a personal transceiver, so small
and compact that every man carries one.” Clarke foresaw that
“the time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere
on Earth merely by dialing a number.” Clarke even predicted that
the phone would be able to determine its current position so that
“no one need ever again be lost.”
5
Building a wireless phone system that could connect anyone
to anyone else virtually anywhere would require developing a very
different kind of network. Existing radio telephones worked by
connecting subscribers to a central radio tower in each city. Each
person connecting needed his or her own frequency, and only a
couple of dozen or so frequencies were available.
The cellular system that began to be developed in the 1970s
works on a different principle. Instead of one tower and a handful
transceiver
A device that can
both send and receive
communications or data.
