Starting with the definition
“First mobile phone” can mean several different things: the first telephone you could use while traveling, the first one you could carry in your hand, or the first one sold in a modern cellular network. Each has a different answer, and the answers are separated by decades. Treating them separately avoids the confusion that surrounds the topic.
Telephones in vehicles
Radio communication in vehicles came before the telephone version, and it grew out of the earlier wireless telegraphy of the 1900s. In the 1920s and 1930s, police departments began using one-way radio in cars, and later two-way radio for dispatch. These were radio systems, not connected to the public telephone network.
The idea of linking a vehicle to the ordinary telephone network by radio was put into practice in the 1940s. In 1946, the Bell System began a mobile telephone service in St. Louis, Missouri, and similar services opened in other U.S. cities soon afterward. These were of limited capacity. A customer picked up a handset in the car, an operator was reached by radio, and the operator placed the call. Only a few channels were available in each city, so calls often had to wait. Equipment was heavy: the radio gear filled much of a car’s trunk and drew a lot of power, and the handset was only the visible part.
Services of this type appeared in other countries over the following years. Sweden launched a mobile telephone service in the 1950s, and in the 1960s, systems that connected calls without an operator came into use in several places. Automatic dialing made car phones easier to use, but capacity remained scarce. A subscriber might wait years for a line, and use was largely restricted to professionals, officials and wealthy individuals.
Portable radio telephones
There are also reports of early portable devices. A Soviet inventor, Leonid Kupriyanovich, is described in some accounts as having built a portable radio telephone in the late 1950s, which weighed a few kilograms and worked through a base station. The description comes mainly from later retellings and secondary sources, and it should be read as a reported claim, not a settled fact. Similar experimental devices were built in other countries, and some were used by firms and agencies on a small scale. None of them was part of a cellular system that could serve large numbers of people.
The cellular breakthrough
The decisive change was to divide the service area into cells, each with a low-power base station, so that frequencies could be reused and many more users could be served. The concept had been outlined at Bell Labs decades before it was practical. As it became feasible in the 1970s, the other piece was a handset that a person could carry.
In 1973, Motorola engineers demonstrated a handheld prototype, and the first call from it is commonly dated to April of that year. Over the next decade, that prototype developed into a commercial product. The details of the handset, and what the 1983 model could do, are described in the account of the Motorola DynaTAC. Here the point is that the handheld cellular phone was the combination of a small radio, a battery and a network of cells, and that all three had to be in place.
Meanwhile, other countries launched cellular networks before the American one reached the public. Japan started a commercial cellular network in 1979, and the Nordic countries followed in 1981. The first handsets on those networks were generally car-mounted or “transportable” sets, which weighed several kilograms and came with a carrying handle and a battery pack. So a claim for the first handheld phone and a claim for the first cellular service are different, and each country can make a case.
From briefcase to pocket
In the 1980s, a typical mobile phone was either permanently installed in a car, or a “transportable” that could be carried but not comfortably. Truly pocketable handsets arrived gradually in the 1990s. A number of changes made this possible:
- Smaller, more efficient radio chips, built on the same kind of silicon chips used in other electronics.
- Better batteries, with nickel-based cells replaced later by lithium-ion batteries.
- Digital networks, which made efficient use of spectrum and allowed more compact transmitters.
- Foldable and flip designs that protected the keypad and reduced the length of the handset.
By the late 1990s, a phone could slip into a shirt pocket, last several days on standby and send text messages. At that point the mobile phone had stopped being a status symbol of the few and become a common consumer item in many countries.
Weighing the claims
A balanced summary might be:
- The first telephone service for vehicles: the mid-1940s in the United States, with earlier radio work.
- The first reported portable radio telephones: the 1950s and 1960s, with uncertain documentation.
- The first handheld cellular phone call: 1973, by a Motorola team.
- The first commercial cellular networks: 1979 in Japan, 1981 in the Nordic countries, 1983 in the United States.
- The first commercial handheld cellular phone: generally the 1983 Motorola model in the United States.
None of these is the one true answer, which is why careful writers add qualifiers. Mobile phone history is a story of parts coming together, with different countries and companies leading at different moments.