Although mobile phones are usually thought of as being modern technology, they in actual fact have existed in one form or another since the mid 1920s. The first mobile telephones were, in essence transportable radio sets, also known as mobile rigs, which communicated with a remote transceiver connected to a telephone line. As a result of the limited amount of available bandwidth, the relatively short range of the radio transmissions, and the poor audio quality of line-based telephony and short wave radio equipment at the time, these were incredibly rare, not particularly useful, and only available to the very rich. Nowadays, you can get a state of the art Nokia 8800 from Vodafone for free with a monthly contract, but if you wanted to use a mobile telephone back in the nineteen twenties, you had to go to Germany, or get a job as an airline pilot! The first people to be able to use radio telephony were passengers on first-class trains between Berlin and Hamburg in 1926.



The hand held mobile telephones that we use today have their origins in the old USSR. A young radio engineer named Leonid Kupriyanovich made the first prototype model of an automatic, wearable, radio phone in 1957. The LK-1, as it was called, weighed a hefty 3 kilos, meaning that it had to be carried in a rucksack, and had a battery life of 20-30 hours depending on usage. It communicated with the telephone network via a base station, which could serve a number of customers within a radius of over twenty kilometres. The following year, he invented a smaller version, which sacrificed battery life and range for portability. It was considerably lighter at 0.5kg, and could, theoretically, be carried in a big sturdy pocket or leather holster.

Electronics wizards at Bell Labs in the US envisioned the basic idea behind the hexagonal cell-type transmission element in 1947, although the technology that was required to make the design a reality was not developed until the nineteen sixties. The world's first entirely automatic mobile telephone system, entitled Mobile Telephone system A, or MTA for short, was developed and commercially released domestically in 1956 by the Swedish technology giant Ericsson. The principal problem with this system was the massive weight and size of the unit, relying as it did on bulky, heavy, and fragile valve technology, and uptake was slow. A smaller transistor-based model, entitled the MTB, was introduced in 1965. This was a good deal more popular, and by the time the network was shut down in 1983 it had over six hundred regular users in Sweden.