Brick Phones: The Ancestor of Mobile Phones
How did we get to the smartphones we have today? Let’s take a look back at the first commercial mobile phone. Motorola’s vice president, Dr. Martin Cooper, made the first mobile phone call to a rival company in 1973, bragging that he was speaking on a mobile phone. After 10 years of further development, the first commercial phone, Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, was released in 1983. This phone allowed for 30–35 minutes of talk time, then required 10 hours of charging. It weighed about 2.5 pounds and was 9 inches tall. Due to its appearance, it was nicknamed “the brick phone.”
Mobile phones were invented around 1946 by AT&T. However, the power required was very large and could only be supplied by car batteries. Also, each area that had this device had users in waiting lines to use the system. AT&T was planning to accommodate waiting users by breaking down large areas and implementing more car-phones but this involved more frequency coverage. Due to this issue and a request from the FCC in 1968, AT&T developed a cellular architecture plan.
Motorola had a fear of going out of business and did not want AT&T to become a monopoly. The company decided to compete with AT&T using its expertise in radio technology. While Motorola engineers were researching cellular technology, they saw the potential to go beyond car phones and become more portable devices. This would then involve developing a cellular system and infrastructure to accompany portable mobile phones.
“When you park your car and leave, you can’t use your mobile [car phone] but you can take your portable with you” ~ Martin Cooper
This led to Dr. Martin Cooper developing the DynaTAC phone, testing the first phone call with Joel Engel who was the head of AT&T’s rival project, and introducing this prototype at a conference in New York. Developing the world’s first wireless portable cell phone involved a lot of hard work from Cooper’s team of engineers and industrial designers. This device was the first handheld, a wireless cellular phone that could make long-distance calls in comparison to landlines.
To accomplish this portable design, Dr. Cooper’s team had to come up with a design for a large area system. Their concept involved having a large number of overlapping cells in a geographic area. Within each cell, low-powered transmitters allowed frequencies to be reused in cells farther away. The system used computerized network equipment which allowed for a moving caller to be tracked so the call could be adjusted to a new cell and frequency as the caller changed locations. The design involved specialized directional antennas which kept the radio signal focussed where it was needed and did not interfere with neighboring cells. This developed cellular infrastructure was tested in New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Motorola worked with U.S. government agencies for regulatory approval and continued to test and refine their prototype until commercial release.
After the commercial release of the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X in 1983, it was considered a success and revolutionary for its time. Dr. Cooper’s team showed how their problem-solving led to bigger and better ideas and how their time constraints pushed them to work hard and efficiently. Regardless of how advanced the idea sounded for its time, this team did everything to get to the end goal of achieving a portable cellular device, which sets an example for other engineering teams. Although the price for each device was about $3,995 (equivalent to about $11,094 today), 1200 sets were sold that year. Initially, it became a necessity for business owners. After about another decade, mobile phones started to become more popular among average consumers. Movies and TV programs helped introduce mobile phones to the public and contributed to promoting sales.
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X paved a way for advancement in mobile technology. Motorola’s engineers continuously worked on improving the device by compacting the size, increasing the battery, decreasing the costs, storing contacts, and more. Along with Motorola, other companies, such as IBM and Nokia, were developing these mobile phones with improved features and were selling as competitors. Throughout the 1990s, mobile phones became more compact and easy to carry. In the early 2000s, there were the iconic Motorola RAZR flip-phones and Blackberry Pearl phones. By the end of that decade, smartphones were debuted by Apple and Samsung and became popular in the 2010s until now.
The original brick phones used the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) network in their infrastructure. Eventually, this network phased out and the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network was adopted, which involved 2G. In the past few decades, this transitioned to 3G, 4G, and 5G. A key feature of the GSM is the use of the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM card). SIM cards are still in mobile phones today which identifies a phone with a phone number and is needed to make and receive calls without wi-fi.
Now it has become a necessity for everyone to own a mobile phone. Just as it was originally introduced, mobile phones today can make phone calls and store contacts, along with sending and receiving voicemails and text messages. Over time, mobile phones progressed to having the ability to take and store photos, videos, and audio. Today, mobile phones have advanced so much that in comparison to the first model, it is like a mini-computer. Users can conveniently check their emails, the news, the weather, as well as use a variety of features such as an alarm clock, calculator, health tracking, games, listen to music, perform certain school/work tasks, make payments, and more.
