Mobile Phone History | Invention story of Mobile Phones

Mobile Phone History | Invention story of Mobile Phones

Mobile Phones have proved themselves to be one of the greatest gifts to the mankind. They have become an indispensible part of our lives. But going back in time, owning a mobile phone was confined to members of affluent class. All thanks to cost cutting techniques and innovations over a period of time; mobile phones are now affordable for everyone. With a plethora of mobile phones sets flooding the market, they are not just catering to the needs but are acting as status symbols for many.

Origin of this gadget is quite interesting. Starting from bulky mobiles phones which were as long and heavy as one’s forearms, to ultra thin and techno savvy handsets, mobiles phones have covered a long way so far. It all started with the basic telephony. Alexander Graham Bell was the first one to patent telephone in the year 1876. This technology was developed using the equipment designed for telegraph. Calls were connected with the help of operators. And a pillar of the mobile telephony came into existence when Charles Stevenson invented radio communication in early 1890s for keeping contacts with the offshore lighthouses. Marconi transmitted signals over the distance of 2 kms in year 1894. And Fessenden capably broadcasted music through radio by 1906.

And the following development was merger of radio telephone technology. In 1926, first class passenger trains, running from Berlin to Hamburg used the technology. These radio telephones were also used for air traffic safety as well as in the passenger airplanes. At the time of Second World War, German tanks made great use of these radio telephones too.

Two way radios was an ancestor of the mobiles phones. These radios also known as the mobile rigs, were fixed police cruisers, ambulances, taxicabs before advent of handheld mobile phones. Since the mobile radios were given connection to telephone network, one could not dial these from the home phones. And slowly this technology gained popularity among the mobile radio users.

Later versions of these radio phones incorporated cigarette lighter plugs and were called bag phones. Fixed in the vehicles, these gadgets were either used as portable two way radios or mobile phones. And then in 1940s, Motorola came with new developments in mobile phones. And this is how Walkie Talkie was born. Large, bulky and battery operated, this Handie Talkie soon found a way to US military.

Another turning point came in the history of mobile phones when the base station for mobile phones came into being. Engineers from Bell Labs developed the base stations in 1947. The same year, W. Rae Philip and Douglas H. Ring developed hexagonal cells for these mobile phones. But an engineer, Porter from Bell Labs, suggested positioning of the cell towers at corners of hexagons instead of center. He also argued for the directional antennas, for transmitting or receiving the signals in the three directions, into adjacent hexagon cells.

In 1956, Ericsson Company released the earliest full automatic cellular phone system called MTA in Sweden. Though this gadget was operated automatically but due to its bulkiness, could not really hold the users interest for long. It is surprising to hear that this mobile phone weighed around 40 kgs back then. And then improved and lighter version of the same phone was introduced in 1965. This was known as MTB and used the DTMF signaling.

Soon in 1957, Leonid Kupriyanovich developed experimental model of wearable mobile phones in Moscow, operating with the help of base station. This young engineer had earlier developed the radio phone known as LK-1. The battery life of the wearable mobile phone by the young inventor lasted for around 20-30 hours. Weighing 3 kg, it worked within the distance of 20 to 30 km from the station. Later he patented the mobile phones and also came up with a version of pocket mobile phone that was just of 0.5 Kgs in the same year.

Then again automatic pocket mobile phone was developed in 1966 at Bulgaria. Called RAT-0.5, phone coordinated with the base station known as RATZ-10. And further developments in the field of the cellular phones were witnessed in 1967. It was decided that every mobile phone would be catered to a base station throughout its life. Though this was not that novel concept, need of one base station at least broke continuity of the automatic services to the mobile phones. After three years, in 1970, another engineer Ames E. Joel invented automatically operated call handoff technology. This system allowed the mobile phones to pass through cell areas while making a phone call without any loss of conversation. This was the time when the mobile user could use the gadget without any disturbance.

Further in year 1971, AT&T Incorporation projected mobile phone service that was approved by FCC later. Another development in the history of mobile phones was registered with ARP network’s success launched in Finland. It was the earliest commercial cellular phones and was known as Zero Generation mobile network.

Invention of mobile phones that closely resembles today’s mobile phones is credited to Martin Cooper, employer and researcher of Motorola. He initially developed cellular phone named Motorola Dynatac in 1973. With 5 inches width and 9 inches length, this 2.5 pounds weighing phone carried around 30 circuit boards in it. With recharge time of around 10 hours, talk time of 35 minutes, this phone gave comfortable talking experience to the users. One could listen, dial and talk on this mobile phone but what was missing was display screen. With passing time, refinements were made and these mobile phones improved by leaps and bounds.

With introduction of Global System for the mobile communications, radio spectrum could be used effectively. The technology gave great voice quality, international roaming facilities along with compatibility with ISDN systems. And further for providing coverage to the remote areas that ISDN, GSM and cellular phones could not offer, satellite phones came into being. Base station for the satellite phones were built in the geostationary satellites. And now there is no place on the planet that is untouched by the mobile phones.

technology/Satellite History | Invention Story of Satellites

Satellite History | Invention Story of Satellites

It all started with basketball-sized pack of technology known as Sputnik 1. World’s first ever satellite was launched on October 4, 1957 by Soviet Union. Weighing 183 pounds, it took around 98 minutes to orbit Earth. While launch of the satellite was just a single event, it marked the beginning of space age and steered new military, political, scientific and technological developments.

The seed of its invention was sown back in year 1952, when International Council of Scientific Unions came to a decision of establishing July 1, 1957-December 31, 1958 as International Geophysical yr. It was decided so because scientists knew solar activity cycle would be at high points around this time. And eventually, council took up a resolution calling launch of the artificial satellites during International Geophysical yr. for mapping Earth’s surface.

White House declared plans of launching earth orbiting satellite and requested proposals from different governmental research agencies for undertaking development in July 1955. Vanguard proposal by Naval Research lab was picked for representing U.S during International Geophysical yr. And launch of Sputnik revolutionized everything. The technical achievement of Sputnik was that it did not just grab world’s attention but America’s public off-guard too. The size of this satellite was impressive as compared to Vangaurd and anticipated payload of 3.5 pounds. Additionally, public feared Soviet’s ability to commence satellites also translated to capability for launching ballistic missiles that could be used to transfer missiles from Europe to U.S. After that, Soviet’s had hit back with launch of Sputnik II on November 3, 1957.

Also, immediately after the launch of Sputnik 1, Defense department of U.S retorted to political disturbance with fund approval for Satellite project. Later as an alternative to the Vangaurd, work was initiated on Explorer project. Eventually, U.S launched Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958.

google/recent events/The Pluses and Minuses of Google+

It’s clear that Google has created an interesting suite of tools and is trying to take advantage of how people rely on their social networks to discover new content.These days, you may rely on your social networks to find the latest news or funny cat videos rather than using search. Google+ clearly is an attempt to move with the times.But does it work? The short answer is that there’s a lot of potential in Google+. We’ve heard that before — Google Wave was a tool that had nothing but potential. But it was hard to define what Wave did in a way that made sense to the average user. In some ways, Google+ falls victim to the same problem. Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages. We’ll start with the pluses:

Google+ uses “Circles” to help you group people into categories and makes it easy to share content with specific people. I have circles for my friends, my family and my professional peers. Creating circles is easy and Google+ uses a simple drag-and-drop interface to let you add people to each circle. You can add the same person to multiple circles if you like.

Sharing using circles is a breeze. If I want to share a funny story about my day, I may only want my friends and family to see the post and keep the rest of the world in the dark. No problem, I just select those circles when I create the content and everyone else is spared my anecdote. Or I might choose to share it with the world and keep the post Public, meaning anyone could read about my hilarious misadventures.

The hangout feature is a blast. Hangouts let you create a video chat room with up to nine other people. Whomever is talking — or speaking more loudly than anyone else — takes center stage. As one person finishes speaking and someone else begins to chat, the main video feed switches automatically. Considering most of the people I know on Google+ right now are tech journalists, this feature makes it feel like you’re hopping from one podcast to another.

The Android integration is great, particularly for huddles. Huddles make it easy to create a social group on the fly. Imagine you want to organize a quick get together among friends but you don’t want to broadcast it to the world at large. Creating a huddle lets you send messages to this specific group while excluding everyone else. Everyone in the group can read and respond to messages, turning the huddle into a party line. This is sort of what Twitter was supposed to be and what services like Beluga are doing now.

Sharing photos is easy. You can create photo albums, tag people and share images with whichever circles (or the public at large) you like. I have some images that anyone can see and others that only my friends have access to. And if you have Google+ on your phone, the instant upload feature makes it insanely simple to share a photo snapped by your phone that very second.

Now let’s look at some of the minuses as I see them:

It’s still a little confusing, though nowhere near as mystifying as Google Wave was.

Many of the features in Google+ are in other social networking sites or services. Facebook lets you create filters (though it’s not quite as easy or intuitive as it is in Google+). Beluga lets you create quick messaging groups among a set number of people. Google+ might be a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist. I’m not sure there’s enough there to compel people to use it in place of (or in addition to) other services.

Sparks, a Google+ service that pulls links related to your interests, hasn’t blown me away yet. I can’t see it replacing Google Reader or other RSS services for the moment. But maybe that will get better as time goes on.

I know a lot of people who have multiple email addresses, apparently. I don’t see an easy way in Google+ to consolidate these addresses into a single contact. I know I can do that in gmail and fix the problem that way but it would be nice to be able to do it in Google+. There may even be a way to do it and I just haven’t seen it yet.

Pulling content from other sources such as Facebook, Flickr or even YouTube isn’t intuitive. And it’s a little perplexing that YouTube compatibility isn’t built in at the beginning considering it belongs to Google. You can share videos on your Google+ stream but you have to upload them — you can’t just link to a YouTube account. I hope Google adds in a YouTube feature in a subsequent version of Google+.

It’s also difficult to really see the full potential of Google+ with such a small number of users. I don’t count that as a minus — Google wants to give the product a field test before unleashing it upon the world at large. But it does mean that getting a handle on exactly how useful all the features will be once the service goes gold is a bit tricky.

For the moment, Google has put a freeze on invitations to the network. I know that’s frustrating for people who really want to give the service a try but it makes sense from a quality assurance perspective. Will Google+ manage to do to Facebook what Facebook did to Myspace? We’ll have to wait and see

technology/NASA lander prototype ditches the manpower for an autonomous flight

Hear that? Those were the giddy giggles of some very happy scientists down at NASA's Alabama-based Marshall Space Flight Center. Besting its previous June record for autonomous flight, this prototype robotic lander hovered for nearly half a minute at a height of seven feet before parking itself safely on the ground. Conceived as a joint project between NASA, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation, the intelligent bot is slated to go where its parachuting, aero-braking cousins can't -- like the Moon, or an asteroid. Future tests are on deck for the self-propelled lander to hover up to one hundred feet over the short span of a minute -- no doubt its current feat is pretty neat, but we wouldn't want to be the unsuspecting dolt who walked under it without his infrared goggles on.

technology/Thin film coating makes everlasting energy a piezoelectric possibility

Let's be honest, it's no big secret that we're running out of dead dinosaurs to fuel our lives. And with recent natural catastrophes proving atomic energy isn't what you'd call 'safe,' it's a good thing the researchers down at the RMIT University in Melbourne have been hard at work figuring out how to turn you into a self-sustained energy source. Marrying piezoelectrics with a thin film microchip coating, those scientists Down Under have for the first time identified just how much energy your pressure can generate. This is certainly not the first time the tech has been put to use -- Orange UK's been doing something similar, albeit bulkier, for the Glastonbury fest each year. What are some practical uses, you ask? Imagine a gym powered by a sea of workout-hamsters, each producing significant energy from the soles of their feet. Curious for more? Try a pacemaker that runs solely on blood pressure, or a laptop charged by banging out Facebook updates. Who knows, maybe even RIM can put this to use in its next Storm. Just sayin'.