Why Are Mobile Phones Called Cell Phones?

The smartphone you carry with you every day has been commonly referred to as a mobile phone, a cell phone, or a cellular phone. While the term “mobile phone” makes sense, why then was a phone ever called a “cellular phone”? To answer that question, we need to first go back to how things got started.

How It All Began

Before the advent of a phone that you could carry around, cellular had a biological or geological meaning and meant “consisting of cells” or “something that contains cavities.” While that definition still stands, the word “cellular” added a new technological meaning with a concept brought forth by two Bell Lab engineers in 1947 named Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young. They proposed a network composed of hexagonal cells to allow mobile phones in cars to operate from one spot to another seamlessly. Their network layout resembled that of a biological cell, hence the term cellular, but the technology to implement their concept didn’t exist at the time.

It wasn’t until the late 1960s when another group of Bell Lab researchers expanded on the idea from Ring and Young and began to develop a way for the technology to work. Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel, and Philip T. Porter did just that, and Porter was the first to propose that a multi-directional antenna, or cell tower, be used in the middle of each…