The history
Eighty years from phones bolted into cars to a billion Indian connections and a supercomputer in every pocket.
Radio could carry voices long before anyone could carry the radio. The breakthrough was an idea from 1947: cut a city into small cells and reuse the same channels again and again. It took computers and chips to make it work. Then phones went digital, learned to text, joined the internet, and in India, cheap data in 2016 brought hundreds of millions of people online for the first time.
1973
Handheld mobile call
Martin Cooper, Motorola, New York
1979
Cellular network
NTT, Tokyo
1991
GSM call
Harri Holkeri, Finland
1992
Text message (SMS)
Neil Papworth, UK
1995
Mobile call in India
Jyoti Basu to Sukh Ram, Kolkata to Delhi
2009
4G network
TeliaSonera, Stockholm and Oslo
2019
5G phone networks
South Korea and USA
1940 – 1972
Phones in cars, one big transmitter per city, and the idea of cells on paper.
1942
11 August 1942
Film star Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil patented a way to stop radio-guided torpedoes being jammed: the sender and receiver hop between frequencies in the same secret order. The navy shelved it at the time.
Why it mattered. Frequency hopping and spread-spectrum ideas later helped make crowded digital radio, including some phone systems, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, work.
1946
17 June 1946
The Mobile Telephone Service let drivers make calls from a heavy radio set in the boot. One big transmitter covered the whole city, so only a few calls could happen at once, and an operator connected every one.
Why it mattered. It showed the demand, and the limit: one tower for a whole city could never serve many people.
1947
11 December 1947
In an internal memo, Bell Labs engineers proposed covering an area with many small low-power cells, each reusing the same channels as cells far enough away, and hexagons were used to draw them. The electronics to switch calls between cells did not exist yet.
Why it mattered. Frequency reuse in small cells is still how every mobile network works.
1973 – 1990
A handheld call in New York, then analogue 1G networks in Japan, the Nordic countries and the USA. Brick phones for the rich.
1973
3 April 1973
Standing on Sixth Avenue, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper called Joel Engel, his rival at Bell Labs, on a prototype DynaTAC. It weighed about 1.1 kg and its battery gave some 30 minutes of talk after 10 hours of charging.
Why it mattered. It proved a phone could belong to a person, not a car or a building.
1981
1 October 1981
The Nordic Mobile Telephone system opened in Sweden, then Norway, Denmark and Finland. It was the first network to let you roam across countries.
Why it mattered. Countries agreeing one standard became the model for GSM.
1985 – 1998
GSM turns voice into encrypted numbers and adds texting. Mobiles spread worldwide.
1985
Working on the GSM standard, Friedhelm Hillebrand typed out sentences and questions on a typewriter and counted: almost all fitted in 160 characters. That is exactly what fits in 140 bytes at 7 bits a letter.
Why it mattered. The limit shaped texting, and later tweets.
1991
1 July 1991
Finland's former prime minister Harri Holkeri made the first call on a GSM network, built by Nokia and Siemens for the operator Radiolinja. GSM was digital: voice became numbers, encrypted over the air.
Why it mattered. GSM became the world's standard, and the one India adopted.
1992
3 December 1992
Engineer Neil Papworth typed "Merry Christmas" on a computer and sent it to the phone of Vodafone director Richard Jarvis. Phones could not yet type texts back.
Why it mattered. SMS grew into the most used data service in the world for twenty years.
1994
16 August 1994
The IBM Simon Personal Communicator went on sale. It had a touchscreen, email, a calendar and apps, which is why it is often called the first smartphone. Its battery lasted about an hour.
Why it mattered. It showed a phone could also be a pocket computer.
1994 – 2008
Email, the mobile web, cameras, 3G, then touchscreens and app stores.
1999
19 January 1999
RIM launched the BlackBerry 850, a two-way pager with a tiny keyboard that pushed email to you. Phone models followed from 2002 and became the favourite of business people and politicians.
Why it mattered. Always-on email made the phone a work tool, and "CrackBerry" a word.
1999
22 February 1999
DoCoMo's i-mode service put simple web pages, email and ringtone downloads on ordinary phones. Tens of millions of Japanese signed up within a few years.
Why it mattered. It proved people would use the internet on a phone.
2000
November 2000
The Sharp J-SH04 was among the first phones sold with a built-in camera, 0.11 megapixels, and you could send the photo to another phone.
Why it mattered. Today's phone cameras sell more cameras than every other kind put together (see CameraClear).
2007
29 June 2007
Apple's iPhone, announced on 9 January and sold from 29 June, replaced the keypad with a large multi-touch screen and a full web browser. Its App Store followed in 2008.
Why it mattered. It set the shape of the modern smartphone: one big screen, fingers, apps.
1995 – 2016
From a first call in Kolkata to a billion connections, cheap handsets and then the Jio data revolution.
1995
31 July 1995
West Bengal's Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, at Writers' Building in Kolkata, called Union Telecom Minister Sukh Ram in Delhi on a Nokia handset, over the Modi Telstra network. Calls were costly, and for years even receiving one was charged.
Why it mattered. It began the story of the world's second-largest mobile market.
2003
The Nokia 1100, a tough, cheap phone with a torch and a dust-proof keypad, came out in 2003. It sold about 250 million units, among the best-selling electronic gadgets ever, many of them in India.
Why it mattered. Cheap, rugged handsets brought mobile phones to villages and small towns.
2008
11 December 2008
State-owned MTNL started India's first 3G service in Delhi. Private operators followed after the 2010 spectrum auction.
Why it mattered. Mobile internet in India began to be more than slow text pages.
2012
10 April 2012
Airtel opened India's first 4G network in Kolkata, using TD-LTE. For years 4G stayed small, pricey and mostly in big cities.
Why it mattered. India joined the 4G world, though the boom was still to come.
2015
December 2015
TRAI's figures showed India's wireless subscriptions passing 1 billion (1.01 billion) by the end of 2015, with total phone connections having crossed 1 billion that May. Many people had more than one SIM.
Why it mattered. India became the second country, after China, with a billion mobile connections.
2016
5 September 2016
Reliance Jio launched a 4G-only network with free voice calls and months of free data. Rivals slashed prices. According to TRAI, the average price of 1 GB fell from about ₹269 in 2014 to about ₹12 in 2018.
Why it mattered. Hundreds of millions of Indians came online for the first time, on phones, and India became one of the world's biggest users of mobile data.
By the numbers
TRAI figures: the price of mobile data fell by more than 95% after 4G and Jio arrived.
2009 – 2018
4G carries calls, video and payments as internet packets.
2009
14 December 2009
TeliaSonera opened the first commercial LTE networks in Stockholm and Oslo, using OFDM and MIMO antennas. At first you needed a USB modem, not a phone.
Why it mattered. LTE made the network carry everything, even voice, as internet packets.
By the numbers
From ten million in 2002 to well over a billion: counted as SIM connections, and many people have two.
2019 – today
Wider channels, beam-steering antennas and new bands, and the challenge of e-waste.
2019
3 April 2019
South Korea's three operators and America's Verizon switched on the first 5G phone networks within hours of each other. 5G adds wider channels, beam-steering antennas and millimetre-wave bands.
Why it mattered. Faster, lower-delay links, and wireless broadband for homes.
2022
1 October 2022
Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched 5G at the India Mobile Congress. It spread unusually fast: Ookla found India's median mobile download speed rose from about 14 Mbit/s in September 2022 to about 50 Mbit/s in August 2023.
Why it mattered. One of the fastest 5G rollouts anywhere, using the 3.5 GHz and 700 MHz bands.
2024
March 2024
The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 reported that the world threw away 62 million tonnes of electronics in 2022, and only 22.3% was properly collected and recycled.
Why it mattered. Old phones hold gold, copper and cobalt: recycling them matters.
Did you know?
A text message is 160 characters because that is what fits in 140 bytes at 7 bits a letter. In Hindi (Unicode) only 70 fit.
The first handheld mobile weighed about 1.1 kg and gave some 30 minutes of talk.
A 3.5 GHz radio photon carries about a millionth of the energy needed to knock an electron off an atom.
Your phone reports signal strength around −80 to −110 dBm: less than a millionth of a millionth of a watt.
In 2014 a gigabyte of mobile data in India cost about ₹269; by 2018 it was about ₹12.
The people
1914 – 2000 · Actor and inventor · Austria / USA
Co-invented frequency hopping, an idea behind spread-spectrum radio.
born 1928 · Engineer, Motorola · USA
Made the first public call on a handheld mobile phone in 1973.
born 1940 · Telecom engineer · Germany
Chaired the GSM group that set the 160-character length of an SMS.
born 1969 · Software engineer · UK
Sent the first text message, "Merry Christmas", in 1992.
born 1961 · Founder of Research In Motion · Canada
Created the BlackBerry and its push email.
1914 – 2010 · Chief Minister of West Bengal · India
Made India's first mobile call, from Kolkata, on 31 July 1995.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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