Advanced Mobile Phone System - History

History

The first cellular network was the culmination of efforts begun at Bell Labs, which first proposed the idea of a cellular system in 1947, and continued to petition the FCC for channels through the 1950s and 1960s, and research conducted at Motorola. In 1960, John F. Mitchell,an electrical engineer who graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology, became Motorola's chief engineer for its mobile communication products. Mitchell oversaw the development and marketing of the first pager to use transistors.

Motorola had long produced mobile telephones for automobiles, that were large and heavy and consumed too much power to allow their use without the automobile's engine running. Mitchell's team, which included the gifted Dr. Martin Cooper, developed portable cellular telephony, and Mitchell was among the Motorola employees granted a patent for this work in 1973; the first call on the prototype was completed, reportedly, to a wrong number.

While Motorola was developing the cellular phone itself, during 1968-1983, Bell Labs worked on the system called Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), which became the first cellular network in the U.S. Motorola and others designed cell phones for that and other cellular systems.

Martin Cooper, a former general manager for the systems division at Motorola led a team that produced the DynaTAC8000x, first commercially available cellular phone small enough to be easily carried, and made the first phone call from it. And later introduced the so-called Bag Phone.