The History of The Cell Phone

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The History of The Cell Phone

Long ago, smoke signals and tribal drums were used to communicate over short distances. There were no cords. No wires. You were free to send those smoke signals wherever you wanted. But, as time passed, people grew tired of those long, cloudy conversations and teenagers who drummed all night. They started sending messages on horse and rider. And eventually, through wires.

People like Claude Chappe, who invented the telegraph in 1792, and Alexander Graham Bell, who first sent voice transmissions in 1876, made communication easier with the use of wires. Needless to say, the Pony Express went to the glue factory. And people started running to their phones every time they rang.

It wasn't until 1894, outside of Bologna, Italy, that wireless communication got back on track. Late one night, 20-year-old Gulielmo Marconi woke his mother to show her another one of his crazy inventions. He tapped out a message in Morse Code. And in response to the signal, a bell rang on the other end of the room. Because the signal traveled through the air, Marconi called it 'Wireless'.

So, since Bell's telephone wires could carry the human voice, naturally scientists began to search for ways Macron's Wireless could broadcast speech too. And in 1906, Reginald Fessenden did it by changing sound waves into signals through a process called amplitude modulation, or AM for short. It was mobile, but just barely.

American engineer Edwin Armstrong took the next big step, and in 1935, introduced FM (frequency modulation) radio waves. Because FM used less power, and smaller, lighter receivers, wireless was on the move.

Eleven years later, people were already making phone calls from moving vehicles. And in just 37 years more, the first call on a commercial cellular system was made in Chicago on October 13, 1983.
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Today, there are more cell phone users than you can shake a phone cord at. Over 84 million in the United States alone - pretty amazing considering many early estimates said cellular subscribers wouldn't even number one million by 1990.

Cell phones are here to stay. Just accept it. I'll admit that when they first started hitting the streets early this decade, I regarded anyone that whipped one out with a sort of jealous, class-based contempt.

Although there are fears of what the proliferation of radio waves is doing to my unborn children, it is great ...

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