The man who invented the telephone. The first mobile phones. History of mobile communications in the United States

On February 14, 1876, Scottish-American Alexander Graham Bell filed an application with the US Patent Office for a device he invented, which he called a telephone. Just two hours later, another American named Gray made a similar request.

This still happens to inventors today, although very rarely. Bell's luck also lay in the fact that an accident helped him make an outstanding invention. However, to a much greater extent, the telephone owes its appearance to the enormous work, perseverance and knowledge of this person.

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh on March 3, 1847, into a family of philologists. At the age of 14, he moved to London to live with his grandfather, under whose guidance he studied literature and public speaking. And three years later he began an independent life, teaching music and public speaking at Weston House Academy. In the spring of 1871, the family moved to Boston, where Bell taught a school for the deaf and dumb using the "system of visible speech" invented by his grandfather.
At that time, the Western Union Company was looking for a way to simultaneously transmit several telegrams over one pair of wires in order to eliminate the need to lay additional telegraph lines. The company announced a large cash prize for the inventor who proposes a similar method.

Bell began to work on this problem, using his knowledge of the laws of acoustics. Bell was going to transmit seven telegrams simultaneously, according to the number of musical notes - a tribute to the music he had loved since childhood. Bell was helped in his work on the “musical telegraph” by a young Boston resident, Thomas Watson. Watson admired Bell.

“Once, when I was working, a tall, slender, agile man with a pale face, black sideburns and a high sloping forehead quickly approached my workbench, holding in his hands some part of the apparatus that was not made the way he wanted. “He was the first educated person with whom I became closely acquainted, and much about him delighted me.”
Thomas Watson
about Graham Bell

And not only him. Bell's horizons were unusually broad, which was recognized by many of his contemporaries. His versatile education was combined with a lively imagination, and this allowed him to easily combine in his experiments such diverse areas of science and art - acoustics, music, electrical engineering and mechanics.

Since Bell was not an electrician, he consulted another famous Bostonian, the scientist D. Henry, after whom the unit of inductance is named. After examining the first sample of the telegraph at Bell Laboratory, Henry exclaimed: “Under any pretext, do not quit what you started!” Without abandoning work on the “musical telegraph,” Bell at the same time began to build a certain apparatus, through which he hoped to make the sounds of speech visible to the deaf and dumb immediately and directly, without any written notation. To do this, he worked for almost a year at the Massachusetts Otolaryngological Hospital, conducting various experiments to study human hearing.

The main part of the apparatus was to be a membrane; a needle attached to the latter recorded curves corresponding to various sounds, syllables and words on the surface of a rotating drum. Reflecting on the action of the membrane, Bell came up with the idea of ​​​​another device, with the help of which, as he wrote, “the transmission of various sounds will become possible, if only it is possible to cause fluctuations in the intensity of the electric current corresponding to the fluctuations in the density of the air which the given sound produces.” Bell gave this still non-existent device the sonorous name “telephone”. Thus, work on the particular task of helping the deaf and dumb led to the idea of ​​​​the possibility of creating a device that turned out to be necessary for all of humanity and, undoubtedly, influenced the further course of history.

While working on the “musical telegraph,” Bell and Watson worked in separate rooms where the transmitting and receiving apparatus were installed. Tuning forks were steel plates of different lengths, rigidly fixed at one end and closing an electrical circuit at the other.
One day, Watson had to free the end of a record that was stuck in the contact gap and in the process touched other records. Naturally, they rattled. Writer Mitchell Wilson describes subsequent events as follows: “Although the experimenters believed that the line was not working, Bell’s keen hearing caught a faint rattling sound in the receiving device. He immediately guessed what had happened and rushed headlong into Watson’s room. “What were you doing now? - he shouted. “Don’t change anything!” Watson began to explain what was the matter, but Bell excitedly interrupted him, saying that they had now discovered what they had been looking for all along.” The stuck plate acted like a primitive diaphragm. In all of Bell and Watson's previous experiments, the free end simply closed and opened an electrical circuit. Now the sound vibrations of the plate induced electromagnetic vibrations in a magnet located next to the plate. This was the difference between the telephone and all other pre-existing telegraph devices.

For the telephone to operate, a continuous electric current is required, the strength of which would vary in exact accordance with the vibrations of sound waves in the air. The invention of the telephone coincided with the peak of the electric telegraph and was completely unexpected. At that time, in the United States, the Morse-based Magnetic Telegraph Company was completing construction of a line from Mississippi to the East Coast. In Russia, Boris Jacobi created more and more advanced devices, surpassing all competitors in reliability and transmission speed. The telegraph was so consistent with the needs of its era that other means of electrical communication were, it seems, not needed at all.

The world's first telephone, assembled by Watson, had a sound membrane made of leather. Its center was connected to the moving armature of the electromagnet. Sound vibrations were amplified by the horn, concentrating on a membrane fixed in its smallest section.

Bell's breadth of vision played no less a role in the invention of the telephone than his intuition. Knowledge of acoustics and electrical engineering, combined with experience as an experimenter, led a teacher at a school for deaf children to an invention that allowed millions of people to hear each other across continents and oceans.

Meanwhile, telephony as the principle of transmitting information by voice over long distances was known even before the new era. The Persian king Cyrus (VI century BC) employed 30,000 people called “royal ears” for this purpose. Positioned on the tops of hills and watchtowers within earshot of each other, they conveyed messages intended for the king and his orders. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC) testifies that in one day, news via such a telephone was transmitted over a thirty-day journey. Julius Caesar mentions that the Gauls also had a similar communication system. It even indicates the speed of message transmission - 100 kilometers per hour.

In 1876, Bell demonstrated his apparatus at the Philadelphia World's Fair. The word telephone was heard for the first time within the walls of the exhibition pavilion - this is how the inventor recommended his “talking telegraph”. To the amazement of the jury, the monologue of the Prince of Denmark “To be or not to be?” was heard from the mouthpiece of this contraption, performed at the same time, but in a different room, by the inventor himself, Mr. Bell.

History answered this question with an unquestioning “to be.” Bell's invention became a sensation at the Philadelphia Exhibition. And this is despite the fact that the first telephone worked with monstrous sound distortions, it was possible to talk with its help no further than 250 meters, because it operated without batteries, by the power of electromagnetic induction alone, its receiving and transmitting devices were the same primitive.

Having organized the Bell Telephone Society, the inventor began hard work to improve his brainchild, and a year later he patented a new membrane and fittings for the telephone. Then he used a Yuz carbon microphone and battery power to increase the transmission distance. In this form, the telephone successfully existed for more than a hundred years.
Many other inventors began improving telephone devices, and by 1900, more than 3 thousand patents had been issued in this area. Of these, we can note the microphone designed by the Russian engineer M. Makhalsky (1878), as well as the first automatic station for 10,000 numbers by S. M. Apostolov (1894). But then, after the Philadelphia Exhibition, the history of the telephone was just beginning. Ahead was a fierce struggle with competitors. Bell also faced competition with another famous inventor, Thomas Edison.

Bell's patent turned out to be one of the most lucrative patents ever issued in the United States, and over the next decades he was targeted by nearly every major electrical and telegraph company in America. However, its commercial significance was not immediately understood by contemporaries. Almost immediately after receiving the patent, Bell offered to buy it to Western Union for $100,000, hoping that the proceeds would enable him to pay off his debts. But his proposal did not meet with a response.

Bell demonstrated his phone to audiences in Salem, Boston, and New York. The first broadcasts consisted mainly of playing musical instruments and singing popular arias. Newspapers wrote about the inventor with respect, but his activities brought almost no money.

On June 11, 1877, Bell and Mabel Hubbard were married at the home of the bride's parents, and the young couple sailed to England. This trip played a huge role in the history of the telephone. In England, Bell successfully continued his demonstrations, which attracted large crowds. Finally, a "delightful telephone performance" was given to the Queen herself and her family. The titled persons sang, recited and talked to each other over the wires, interrupting themselves with questions about whether they could be heard well. The queen was pleased.

Newspapers made so much noise about the success of the telephone in England that Western Union had to change its attitude towards the invention. The company's president, Orton, reasoned that if the electric telephone was invented by some teacher for the deaf, then specialists like Edison and Gray would be able to create a better device. And at the beginning of 1879, Western Union created the American Speaker Telephone Company, which began producing telephones, ignoring Bell's patent rights.

Bell's supporters took out loans, created the New England Telephone Company in response, and rushed into battle. The result of the struggle, however, was the creation of the united Bell Company at the end of 1879. In December of that year, the share price rose to $995. Bell became an extremely wealthy man. Wealth was accompanied by fame and worldwide fame. France awarded him the Volta Prize, established by Napoleon, in the amount of 50 thousand francs (before Bell, this prize was awarded only once), and made him a Knight of the Legion of Honor. In 1885 he took American citizenship.

In one of his letters to his associates, Bell, for the first time in history and in great detail, outlined a plan to create a telephone network in a large city based on a central switchboard. In the letter, he insisted that for advertising purposes it would be desirable to install telephone sets free of charge in the central stores of the city.

On the rainy morning of August 4, 1922, all telephones in the United States and Canada were turned off for a minute. America buried Alexander Graham Bell. 13 million telephone sets of all kinds and designs fell silent in honor of the great inventor.

Ordinary Story: Telephone

A mobile phone in the modern world is already a necessity. A person cannot imagine himself without this device and experiences discomfort when he finds himself “separation” from it. Needless to say, this truly unique invention not only simplified life, but also pulled humanity into the technological chain of progress. It's hard to imagine, but many people remember life without phones. It would seem that just yesterday a communication device was more of an invention of the science fiction genre, but today it is an essential item.

Pioneer of the mobile era

Motorola can hardly be called a leader in the mobile phone market. However, it was this company that released the very first mobile phone in the world. It was a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X model.

Motorola DynaTAC 8000X

The release took place in 1983. Its first development was presented 10 years before this historical moment.

In the US, the story of 1973 is told as a legend. It was then that inventor Martin Cooper, walking around Manhattan, defiantly made a call on the mobile phone he had created. Witnesses to this spectacle questioned the adequacy of Cooper's condition, mistaking him for being overly drunk or sick.

What characteristics did the device have:

• The phone's memory stored up to 30 numbers;
• The weight of the first mobile phone was 1 kg;
• a fully charged battery provided 1 hour of operation;
• the cost of such a phone was $3,995 (it’s worth noting that this was the price of a good car in those days).

The modern generation, reading this, will smile sarcastically, but such an achievement was not just a breakthrough, but also the first step towards today's successes in this area.

Top 5 legendary telephone inventions

After the world received a mobile phone, many companies began to work in this direction, trying to invent something similar, or even better, surpass the previous creator. As in any field, the success of an invention is confirmed by its mass appeal. In our case, these are people who used phones. Some models were promising and ended up not being liked by the public, others were not so advertised, but became real favorites. Let's consider the most sensational models:

• Nokia Mobira Senator is a car phone. Most mobile devices of those times weighed a lot, so they found their application in cars. This Nokia model weighed about 10 kg. It earned its fame in our country due to the fact that it was Gorbachev who used it.

Nokia Mobira Senator

• Nokia 8110 - or better known as the banana phone from the movie “The Matrix”. It is unknown what made this model so popular, the film or the unusual shape. However, this year it returns to store shelves in a re-released version. Its cost is about $120 in our country, the phone is made in black, as well as the original yellow. There is no doubt that it will find its audience in today's mobile world.

Nokia 8110 reissue

• Motorola StarTAC - the world's first flip phone (1996). About 60 million copies were sold. Such a high demand was associated with an ultra-modern and unique design; in addition, the weight of the device was 90 grams, which was also unusual. The price for this model was about 1 thousand dollars, but this did not stop it from gaining such popularity.

Motorola StarTAC

• Benefon Dragon - was released in 1998. Like no other phone, it is associated with the era of crimson jackets and the so-called “new Russians”. After all, it was precisely this segment of the population that could afford such an expensive pleasure. It was not distinguished by its special design or attractive appearance, but in the absence of a choice, it was considered a luxury item. The weight of the phone was 200 grams, thickness 2.cm, the functionality was quite simple - calls, calculator, alarm clock, calculator.

• Nokia 3310 - 2000 release. The stories about the indestructibility of this phone do not end now. More than 130 million copies have been sold worldwide. Everything ingenious is simple - that’s how you can characterize this phone. Loud speaker, bright screen, easy operation and durability. In addition, everyone has a couple of stories in stock of how the Nokia 3310 helped out in hammering nails and cooking chops, how it survived the flood and was reborn from the ashes.

Smart - era

Having discovered the convenience of using a mobile phone, the world could not stop there. They began to demand more from it: they began to fill it with more and more functions, improve its capabilities, hone its appearance and find new ways to use it. Finally, the time has come when the phone has become not just convenient, but also “smart”. This is a real helper and savior.

“Smart phone” (smart-phone) - combines the functions of a mobile and personal computer.

The world's first famous smartphone is the IBM Simon. Its appearance is far from its modern counterpart, but the functionality and design are undoubtedly the same. The 1kg device included telephone functions, faxing, email, a notepad, a calculator, a clock and several games. The gadget was controlled using a stylus; the screen was fully touch-sensitive. The cost of such pleasure was 1 thousand dollars. The device should have become a real sensation. However, it was not appreciated and passed through fingers. Most likely this is due to the limitation of technological capabilities of that time; no one believed in a smartphone. In addition, the Internet in those memorable times was not entirely in working order, but rather had mythical properties, and the very prospects for the development of mobile communications were not clear to humanity.

The world's first smartphone - IBM Simon

In 1996, Nokia repeated its attempt to conquer the mobile world together with Hewlet-Packard, presenting its development to the public - the HP 700LX PDA. Following it, at the end of the same year, the Nokia 9000 Communicator appeared. A year later, the Taiwanese company known as HTC announced the development of cutting-edge devices that combine the properties of a phone and a PDA. The company's success was not immediate, despite loud statements and colorful promises. Only in 2000 they were able to enter the world market and present a wide selection of their undoubtedly high-quality products.

Modern technologies

When reviewing mobile phones, it is impossible not to dwell on the story about the IPhone. Probably everyone already knows the notorious story of apples and the incredible story of its creator, Steve Jobs. However, the mystery of what lies behind the company’s success has not been solved and cannot be fully solved. Either it was superintuition that made it possible to understand what modern man wants, or it was just a coincidence that happened at the right time. On June 29, 2007, iPhone smartphones with their own iOS operating system went on sale. In just six months, the device gained incredible popularity, while in many ways inferior in characteristics to many phones. Favorite smartphones are still the standard.

Today's competing Android OS first went on sale in 2008 on the T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream). What's next? It would seem that smartphones have reached perfection, surpassing yesterday's computers and phones, becoming an inseparable and accessible companion to humans. Next comes the time of increasing power and marketing tricks. There is no technological sensation expected in the near future, but sales are needed. In order to sell, you need to surprise. This is how phones with a wide diagonal appear, combining a phone and a tablet, curved devices, shockproof and other unusual gadgets.

Modern leaders

Global analytical companies annually work to provide data on the leaders of world markets, including mobile ones. Based on the results of the first quarter of 2018, the leader is Samsung. During the reporting period, they managed to sell 78 million smartphones, which is 22% of the total. Apple is in second place, having sold 52.2 million smartphones - 15%. Huawei is in third place with 11%. In the North American market, Apple has consistently been the leader for many years, occupying 40% of the market.

The market for smartphones and mobile phones has expanded greatly since the advent of the first telephone. Today, almost anyone can buy a smartphone. The assortment panel is so wide that it allows you to choose a gadget to suit every taste and budget.

Interesting facts about mobile phones

Using a mobile phone every day, a person is not even aware of many unusual things and facts related to this gadget:

• The most popular function of a mobile phone is not calls, or even SMS, but the clock. It is to check the time that a person most often uses the phone;
• the contamination of the mobile phone exceeds the contamination of the handle of the flush tank;
• text of the world's first SMS message: “Merry Christmas”;
• A Florida resident became famous for having the highest mobile phone bill – $201,000. Not knowing about the roaming tariff, she used mobile communications while in Canada;
• a driver talking on the phone while driving reacts one third slower than a driver under the influence of alcohol;
• In England, an invention was presented - a toilet capable of recharging a mobile battery.

Man has reached the highest heights in the field of technology. The mobile communications niche is now one of the most popular. People have long been trying to find something similar for themselves: notepads, alarm clocks, players, watches, calculators, etc. The mobile phone combines everything. This pocket assistant stores an incredible amount of information about its owner. In addition, the model of the gadget characterizes the owner as much as possible. Elegance and glamor are preferred by the female part of the population, business people prefer brevity and functionality, and older people prefer ease of use. Whatever the choice, a telephone in our time is a necessity that makes a person mobile, prompt and open.

The history of the mobile phone in pictures.

Today it is difficult to imagine how one could live without cell phones. Involuntarily I remember the old song: “We were both there, you were at the pharmacy, and I was looking for you at the cinema...”. Today such a song could no longer appear. And yet, just 10 years ago a mobile phone was available only to the middle class, 15 years ago it was a luxury, and 20 years ago they did not exist at all.

First samples

First cell phone.

The idea of ​​cellular communications was developed by specialists from the American corporation AT&T Bell Labs. The first conversations on this topic arose in 1946, the idea was made public in 1947. From that moment on, work began in different parts of the world to create a new device.

It should be noted that despite all the advantages of the new type of communication, as many as 37 years passed from the moment the idea arose to the appearance of the first commercial sample. All other technical innovations of the 20th century were introduced much faster.

The first example of such communication in 1946, presented by Bell as an idea, was similar to a hybrid of a regular telephone and a radio station located in the trunk of a car. The radio station in the trunk weighed 12 kg, the communication remote control was in the cabin, and the antenna had to be drilled into the roof.

The radio station could transmit a signal to the telephone exchange and in this way dial a regular telephone. Calling a mobile device was much more difficult: you had to call the PBX, give the station number, so that they would be connected manually. To speak, you had to press a button, and to hear an answer, you had to release it. Plus, there is an abundance of interference and a short range.

Motorola, which competed with Bell, also worked on mobile communications. Motorola engineer Martin Cooper also invented a device whose weight was about 1 kilogram and length 22 cm. It was difficult to hold such a “tube”.

Not surprisingly, there were few people willing to use such a “mobile.” True, in the USA they tried to establish a network of radiotelephones in several cities, but after five years the work stalled. Until the 60s there were no people willing to engage in development.

Mobile communications in the socialist camp

Engineer Kupriyanovich.

In Moscow, the first prototype of the LK-1 portable telephone was demonstrated by engineer L. I. Kupriyanovich in 1957. This sample was also quite impressive: it weighed 3 kg. But the range reached 30 km, and the station’s operating time without changing batteries was 20-30 hours.

Kupriyanovich did not stop there: In 1958, he presented a device weighing 500 g; in 1961, the world saw a device weighing only 70 g. Its range of action was 80 km. The work was carried out at the Voronezh Scientific Research Institute of Communications (VNIIS).

Kupriyanovich's developments were adopted by the Bulgarians. As a result, a Bulgarian mobile communication set appeared at the Moscow exhibition “Inforga-65”: a base station with 12 numbers and a telephone. The dimensions of the phone were approximately the same as a telephone handset. Then the production of mobile devices RAT-05 and ATRT-05 with a base station RATC-10 began. It was used on construction sites and at energy facilities.

But in the USSR, work on the device also continued in Moscow, Moldova, and Belarus. The result was Altai, a fully functional device designed for cars. It was difficult to carry it in your hands due to the base station and batteries. However, ambulances, taxis, and heavy trucks were equipped with this connection.

Transforming “mobile” communications into truly mobile ones

Altai device.

The competition between Bell and Motorola ended with Motorola's victory: in the spring of 1973, a gloating Cooper called his competitors from the street using his new handset, which he easily held in his hand. It was the first call from a cell phone, marking the beginning of a new era. But research and improvements continued for another 15 long years.

In the USSR in the 70s, Altai was still used, but it covered about 30 cities. 16-channel devices operated in the 150 MHz range. A conference mode was provided. Dialing was initially done by rotating the dial, but soon push-button dialing was used. User priority was set: a user with a higher priority could interrupt the conversation of subscribers with a lower priority with his call.

Commercial devices

1992 Motorola 3200 phone.

The commercial mobile phone appeared in the United States in 1983. Motorola was the first to master mass production. The success of its devices was stunning, and by 1990 the number of subscribers reached 11 million. By 1995, their number grew to 90.7 million, and by 2003 - 1.29 billion.

The first cell phones appeared in Russia in 1991. The tube and connection cost $4,000. The first operator with the GSM standard came to us in 1994. Those phones were still quite bulky; you couldn’t put them in your pocket. Some wealthy people (and only they had access to mobile phones) often preferred to have a special person with them who carried the device behind them.

Many companies have joined the development and production of mobile phones. For example, Nokia released a handset with WAP support, the Nokia 7110, in 1998. At the same time, a dual-SIM phone and a phone with a touch screen appeared.

Currently, statistics claim that 9 out of 10 people on Earth have a mobile phone.

Modern smartphones.

Dr Martin Cooper with his first mobile phone model in 1973. Photo from 2007.

Usually the history of the creation of a mobile phone is told something like this.

On April 3, 1973, the head of Motorola's mobile communications division, Martin Cooper, was walking through the center of Manhattan and decided to make a call on his cell phone. The mobile phone was called Dyna-TAC and looked like a brick, weighed more than a kilogram, and had a talk time of only half an hour.

Prior to this, the son of the founder of Motorola, Robert Gelvin, who at that time held the post of executive director of this company, allocated $15 million and gave his subordinates a period of 10 years to create a device that the user could carry with him. The first working sample appeared just a couple of months later. The success of Martin Cooper, who joined the company in 1954 as an ordinary engineer, was facilitated by the fact that since 1967 he had been developing portable walkie-talkies. They led to the idea of ​​the mobile phone.

It is believed that until this moment there were no other mobile telephones that a person could carry with him, like a watch or a notebook. There were walkie-talkies, there were “mobile” phones that could be used in a car or train, but there was no such thing for just walking down the street.

Moreover, until the early 1960s, many companies generally refused to conduct research in the field of creating cellular communications, because they came to the conclusion that, in principle, it was impossible to create a compact cellular telephone device. And none of the specialists from these companies paid attention to the fact that on the other side of the Iron Curtain, photographs began to appear in popular science magazines depicting... a man talking on a mobile phone. (For those in doubt, the numbers of the magazines where the pictures were published will be given, so that everyone can be sure that this is not a graphics editor).

Hoax? Joke? Propaganda? An attempt to misinform Western electronics manufacturers (this industry, as is known, was of strategic military importance)? Maybe we are just talking about an ordinary walkie-talkie? However, further searches led to a completely unexpected conclusion - Martin Cooper was not the first person in history to call on a mobile phone. And not even second.

Engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich demonstrates the capabilities of a mobile phone. "Science and Life", 10, 1958.

The man in the photo from the Science and Life magazine was named Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich, and it was he who turned out to be the person who made the cell phone call 15 years before Cooper. But before we talk about this, let us remember that the basic principles of mobile communications have a very, very long history.

Actually, attempts to make the phone mobile appeared soon after its inception. Field telephones with coils were created to quickly lay a line, and attempts were made to quickly provide communication from a car by throwing wires onto a line running along the highway or connecting to a socket on a pole. Of all this, only field phones have found relatively wide distribution (at one of the mosaics of the Kievskaya metro station in Moscow, modern passengers sometimes mistake a field phone for a mobile phone and laptop).

It became possible to ensure true mobility of telephone communications only after the advent of radio communications in the VHF range. By the 1930s, transmitters had appeared that a person could easily carry on his back or hold in his hands - in particular, they were used by the American radio company NBC for operational reporting from the scene. However, such means of communication have not yet provided connections with automatic telephone exchanges.

Portable VHF transmitter. "Radiofront", 16, 1936

During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet scientist and inventor Georgy Ilyich Babat in besieged Leningrad proposed the so-called “monophone” - an automatic radiotelephone operating in the centimeter range 1000-2000 MHz (currently the GSM standard uses frequencies 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 Hz), number which is encoded in the phone itself, is equipped with an alphabetic keyboard and also has the functions of a voice recorder and an answering machine. “It weighs no more than a Leika film machine,” wrote G. Babat in his article “Monophone” in the Tekhnika-Molodezhi magazine No. 7-8 for 1943: “Wherever the subscriber is - at home, away or at work, in the foyer of a theater, on the tribune of a stadium, watching competitions - everywhere he can turn on his individual monophone in one of the many ends of the wave network branches. Several subscribers can connect to one end, and no matter how many there are, they will not interfere with each other. friend.” Due to the fact that the principles of cellular communication had not yet been invented, Babat proposed using an extensive network of microwave waveguides to connect mobile phones with the base station.

G. Babat, who proposed the idea of ​​a mobile phone

In December 1947, Douglas Ring and Ray Young, employees of the American company Bell, proposed the principle of hexagonal cells for mobile telephony. This happened right in the midst of intense efforts to create a phone that could be used to make calls from a car. The first such service was launched in 1946 in St. Louis by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1947 a system was launched with intermediate stations along the highway, allowing calls from a car on the way from New York to Boston. However, due to imperfections and high cost, these systems were not commercially successful. In 1948, another American telephone company in Richmond managed to establish an auto-dialing car radio telephone service, which was already better. The weight of the equipment of such systems was tens of kilograms and it was placed in the trunk, so the thought of a pocket version did not arise for an inexperienced person to look at it.

Domestic car radiotelephone. Radio, 1947, No. 5.

However, as noted in the same 1946 in the journal “Science and Life”, No. 10, domestic engineers G. Shapiro and I. Zakharchenko developed a telephone communication system from a moving car with a city network, the mobile device of which had a power of only 1 watt and fit under the instrument panel. The power was from a car battery.

The telephone number assigned to the car was connected to the radio installed at the city telephone exchange. To call a city subscriber, you had to turn on the device in the car, which sent your call signs on the air. They were perceived by the base station on the city PBX and the telephone set immediately turned on, working like a regular telephone. When calling a car, the city subscriber dialed the number, this activated the base station, the signal of which was received by the device on the car.

As can be seen from the description, this system was something like a radio tube. During experiments carried out in 1946 in Moscow, a range of the device was achieved over 20 km, and a conversation with Odessa was carried out with excellent audibility. Subsequently, the inventors worked to increase the radius of the base station to 150 km.

It was expected that the telephone system of Shapiro and Zakharchenko would be widely used in the work of fire brigades, air defense units, police, emergency medical and technical assistance. However, there was no further information about the development of the system. It can be assumed that it was considered more expedient for emergency rescue services to use their own departmental communication systems rather than use the GTS.

Alfred Gross could become the creator of the first mobile phone.

In the United States, the inventor Alfred Gross was the first to try to do the impossible. Since 1939, he was passionate about creating portable walkie-talkies, which decades later were called “walkie-talkies.” In 1949, he created a device based on a walkie-talkie, which he called a “wireless remote telephone.” The device could be carried with you, and it gave the owner a signal to answer the phone. It is believed that this was the first simple pager. Gross even implemented it in one of the hospitals in New York, but telephone companies showed no interest in this new product, or in his other ideas in this direction. So America lost the chance to become the birthplace of the first practically working mobile phone.

However, these ideas were developed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USSR. So, one of those who continued the search in the field of mobile communications in our country was Leonid Kupriyanovich. The press of that time reported very little about his personality. It was known that he lived in Moscow, his activities were sparingly described by the press as a “radio engineer” or “radio amateur.” It is also known that Kupriyanovich could be considered a successful person at that time - in the early 60s he had a car.

The consonance of the surnames of Kupriyanovich and Cooper is only the initial link in a chain of strange coincidences in the fate of these individuals. Kupriyanovich, like Cooper and Gross, also started with miniature walkie-talkies - he has been making them since the mid-50s, and many of his designs are striking even now - both in their dimensions and in the simplicity and originality of their solutions. The tube radio he created in 1955 weighed the same as the first transistor walkie-talkies of the early 60s.

Pocket walkie-talkie Kupriyanovich 1955

In 1957, Kupriyanovich demonstrates an even more amazing thing - a walkie-talkie the size of a matchbox and weighing only 50 grams (including power supplies), which can work without changing the power supply for 50 hours and provides communication at a range of two kilometers - quite comparable to products of the 21st century, which can be seen on the windows of current communication stores (photo from the magazine YUT, 3, 1957). As evidenced by the publication in YuT, 12, 1957, this radio station used mercury or manganese batteries.

At the same time, Kupriyanovich not only did without microcircuits, which simply did not exist at that time, but also used miniature lamps together with transistors. In 1957 and 1960, the first and second editions of his book for radio amateurs were published, with the promising title “Pocket Radios.”

The 1960 publication describes a simple radio with just three transistors that can be worn on the wrist - much like the famous watch-talkie from the film "Off Season". The author offered it for repetition by tourists and mushroom pickers, but in real life it was mainly students who showed interest in this design of Kupriyanovich - for tips on exams, which was even included in an episode of Gaidaev’s film comedy “Operation Y”

Kupriyanovich's wrist radio

And, just like Cooper, pocket walkie-talkies inspired Kupriyanovich to make a radiotelephone from which he could call any city telephone, and which he could take with him anywhere. The pessimistic sentiments of foreign companies could not stop a man who knew how to make walkie-talkies from matchboxes.

In 1957 L.I. Kupriyanovich received an author's certificate for “Radiofon” - an automatic radiotelephone with direct dialing. Through an automatic telephone radio station from this device it was possible to connect with any subscriber of the telephone network within the range of the Radiofon transmitter. By that time, the first operating set of equipment was ready, demonstrating the principle of operation of the “Radiophone”, called LK-1 by the inventor (Leonid Kupriyanovich, first sample).
By our standards, the LK-1 was still difficult to call a mobile phone, but it made a great impression on its contemporaries. “The telephone device is small in size, its weight does not exceed three kilograms,” wrote Science and Life. “The power batteries are placed inside the body of the device; their continuous use period is 20-30 hours. LK-1 has 4 special radio tubes, so that the power delivered by the antenna is sufficient for short-wave communication over distances of 20-30 kilometers. The device has 2 antennas; On its front panel there are 4 call switches, a microphone (outside of which headphones are connected) and a dial for dialing.”

Just like in a modern cell phone, Kupriyanovich’s device was connected to the city telephone network through a base station (the author called it ATR - automatic telephone radio station), which received signals from mobile phones to the wired network and transmitted signals from the wired network to mobile phones. 50 years ago, the principles of operation of a mobile phone were described for inexperienced cleaners simply and figuratively: “The ATP connection with any subscriber occurs like a regular telephone, only we control its operation from a distance.”
To operate the mobile phone with the base station, four communication channels were used at four frequencies: two channels were used for transmitting and receiving sound, one for dialing and one for hanging up.

Kupriyanovich's first mobile phone. (“Science and Life, 8, 1957”). On the right is the base station.

The reader may suspect that the LK-1 was a simple radio tube for a telephone. But it turns out that this is not so. “The question involuntarily arises: won’t several simultaneously operating LK-1s interfere with each other?” - writes the same “Science and Life”. “No, because in this case the device uses different tonal frequencies, causing its relays to operate on the ATP (the tonal frequencies will be transmitted on the same wavelength). The frequencies of sound transmission and reception will be different for each device in order to avoid their mutual influence.”

Thus, in LK-1 there was encoding of the number in the telephone itself, and not depending on the wire line, which allows it to be rightfully considered as the first mobile phone. True, judging by the description, this coding was very primitive, and the number of subscribers who had the opportunity to work through one ATP was at first very limited. In addition, in the first demonstrator, the ATP was simply connected to a regular telephone parallel to an existing subscriber point - this made it possible to begin experiments without making changes to the city PBX, but made it difficult to simultaneously “go into the city” from several handsets. However, in 1957 the LK-1 existed in only one copy.

Using the first mobile phone was not as convenient as it is now. (“UT, 7, 1957″)

Nevertheless, the practical possibility of implementing a wearable mobile phone and organizing such a mobile communication service, at least in the form of departmental switches, has been proven. “The range of the device... is several tens of kilometers,” writes Leonid Kupriyanovich in a note for the July 1957 issue of the magazine “Young Technician”. “If within these limits there is only one receiving device, this will be enough to talk with any city resident who has a telephone, and for any number of kilometers.” “Radiotelephones...can be used on vehicles, airplanes and ships. Passengers will be able to call home, work, or book a hotel room directly from the plane. It will find use among tourists, builders, hunters, etc.”

Comic strip in UT magazine, 7, 1957: Tonton calls his family in Paris on his mobile phone from the Moscow festival. Now this should not surprise anyone.

In addition, Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would be able to displace phones built into cars. At the same time, the young inventor immediately used something like a “hands free” headset, i.e. A speakerphone was used instead of an earpiece. In an interview with M. Melgunova, published in the magazine “Behind the Wheel”, 12, 1957, Kupriyanovich intended to introduce mobile phones in two stages. “At first, while there are few radio telephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near the car owner’s home telephone. But later, when there are thousands of such devices, ATP will no longer work for one radiotelephone, but for hundreds and thousands. Moreover, all of them will not interfere with each other, since each of them will have its own tonal frequency, causing its own relay to work.” Thus, Kupriyanovich essentially positioned two types of household appliances at once - simple radio handsets, which were easier to put into production, and a mobile phone service, in which one base station serves thousands of subscribers.

Kupriyanovich with LK-1 in the car. To the right of the device is a speakerphone. “Behind the wheel”, 12, 1957

One can be surprised how accurately Kupriyanovich imagined more than half a century ago how widely the mobile phone would become part of our everyday life.
“By taking such a radiophone with you, you are essentially taking an ordinary telephone set, but without wires,” he wrote a couple of years later. “No matter where you are, you can always be found by phone, you just have to dial the known number of your radiophone from any landline phone (even from a pay phone). The phone rings in your pocket and you start a conversation. If necessary, you can dial any city telephone number directly from a tram, trolleybus, or bus, call an ambulance, fire truck or emergency vehicle, or contact your home...”
It's hard to believe that these words were written by a person who has not visited the 21st century. However, for Kupriyanovich there was no need to travel to the future. He built it.

Block diagram of a simplified version of LK-1

In 1958, Kupryanovich, at the request of radio amateurs, published in the February issue of the magazine “Young Technician” a simplified design of the device, the ATR of which can only work with one radio tube and does not have the function of long-distance calls.

Schematic diagram of a simplified version of LK-1

differential transformer circuit

Using such a mobile phone was somewhat more difficult than modern ones. Before calling a subscriber, it was necessary, in addition to the receiver, to also turn on the transmitter on the handset. Having heard a long telephone beep in the earpiece and made the appropriate switches, one could proceed to dialing the number. But it was still more convenient than on radio stations of that time, since there was no need to switch from receiving to transmitting and ending each phrase with the word “Reception!” At the end of the conversation, the load transmitter turned itself off to save batteries.

Publishing a description in a magazine for youth, Kupriyanovich was not afraid of competition. By this time, he had already prepared a new model of the device, which at that time could be considered revolutionary.

LK-1 and base station. YuT, 2, 1958

The 1958 model of a mobile phone, including its power source, weighed only 500 grams.

This milestone was again taken by world technical thought only... March 6, 1983, i.e. a quarter of a century later. True, Kupriyanovich’s model was not so elegant and was a box with toggle switches and a round dialer disk, to which a regular telephone handset was connected via a wire. It turned out that when talking, either both hands were occupied, or the box had to be hung on the belt. On the other hand, holding a light plastic tube from a household phone in your hands was much more convenient than a device with the weight of an army pistol (According to Martin Cooper, using a mobile phone helped him pump up his muscles well).

According to Kupriyanovich’s calculations, his device should have cost 300-400 Soviet rubles. It was equal to the cost of a good television or a light motorcycle; At such a price, the device would, of course, not be available to every Soviet family, but quite a few would be able to save up for it if they wanted. Commercial mobile phones of the early 80s with a price of 3500-4000 US dollars were also not affordable for all Americans - the millionth subscriber appeared only in 1990.

According to L.I. Kupriyanovich in his article published in the February issue of the magazine “Technology for Youth” for 1959, it was now possible to place up to a thousand communication channels of radiophones with the Asia-Pacific region on one wavelength. To do this, the encoding of the number in the radiophone was done in a pulsed manner, and during a conversation the signal was compressed using a device that the author of the radiophone called a correlator. According to the description in the same article, the work of the correlator was based on the vocoder principle - dividing the speech signal into several frequency ranges, compressing each range and subsequent restoration at the receiving site. True, voice recognition should have deteriorated, but given the quality of wired communications at that time, this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing ATP on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees fifteen years later installed a base station on top of a 50-story building in New York). And judging by the phrase “pocket radiophones made by the author of this article,” we can conclude that in 1959 Kupriyanovich manufactured at least two experimental mobile phones.

The device of 1958 was already more similar to mobile phones

“So far there are only prototypes of the new device, but there is no doubt that it will soon become widespread in transport, in the city telephone network, in industry, on construction sites, etc.” Kupriyanovich writes in the journal “Science and Life” in August 1957. However, three years later, any publications about the further fate of the development, which threatens to make a revolution in communications, completely disappear in the press. Moreover, the inventor himself does not disappear anywhere; for example, in the February issue of "UT" for 1960, he publishes a description of a radio station with automatic calling and a range of 40-50 km, and in the January issue of the same "Technology for Youth" for 1961 - a popular article about microelectronics technologies, in which There is no mention of a radiophone.

All this is so strange and unusual that it involuntarily suggests the thought: was there really a working radiophone?

Skeptics first of all pay attention to the fact that the publications that popular science publications devoted to the radiophone did not cover the sensational fact of the first telephone calls. It is also impossible to accurately determine from photographs whether the inventor is calling on a cell phone or is simply posing. This gives rise to a version: yes, there was an attempt to create a mobile phone, but technically the device could not be completed, so no more was written about it. However, let us think about the question: why on earth should journalists of the 50s consider the call to be a separate event worthy of mention in the press? “So this means a telephone? Not bad, not bad. And it turns out that you can also call on it? This is just a miracle! I would never have believed it!”

Common sense dictates that not a single Soviet popular science magazine would write about a non-working structure in 1957-1959. Such magazines already had something to write about. Satellites fly in space. Physicists have found that a cascade hyperon decays into a lambda-zero particle and a negative pi-meson. Sound technicians restored the original sound of Lenin's voice. Thanks to the TU-104, you can get from Moscow to Khabarovsk in 11 hours 35 minutes. Computers translate from one language to another and play chess. Construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station has begun. Schoolchildren from the Chkalovskaya station made a robot that sees and speaks. Against the backdrop of these events, the creation of a mobile phone is not a sensation at all. Readers are waiting for video phones! “Telephone sets with screens can be built even today, our technology is strong enough,” they write in the same “TM” ... in 1956. “Millions of television viewers are waiting for the radio industry to start producing televisions with color images... It’s high time to think about television broadcasting over wires (cable TV - O.I.),” we read in the same issue. And here, you see, the mobile phone is somehow outdated, even without a video camera and a color display. Well, who would write even half a word about her if she didn’t work?

Then why did the “first call” come to be considered a sensation? The answer is simple: Martin Cooper wanted it that way. On April 3, 1973, he carried out a PR campaign. In order for Motorola to obtain permission to use radio frequencies for civilian mobile communications from the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC), it was necessary to somehow show that mobile communications really had a future. Moreover, competitors were vying for the same frequencies. And it’s no coincidence that Martin Cooper’s first call, according to his own story to journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle, was addressed to a rival: “It was a guy from AT&T who was promoting phones for cars. His name was Joel Angel. I called him and told him that I was calling from the street, from a real “handheld” cell phone. I don't remember what he answered. But you know, I heard his teeth grinding.”

In 1957-1959, Kupriyanovich did not need to share frequencies with a competing company and listen to their gnashing of teeth on a mobile phone. He did not even need to catch up and overtake America, due to the absence of other participants in the race. Like Cooper, Kupriyanovich also carried out PR campaigns - as was customary in the USSR. He came to the editorial offices of popular science publications, demonstrated the devices, and wrote articles about them himself. It is likely that the letters “YUT” in the name of the first device are a device to interest the editors of “Young Technician” to publish it. For unknown reasons, the topic of the radiophone was only covered by the country's leading amateur radio magazine - "Radio", as well as all other Kupriyanovich designs - except for the pocket radio of 1955.

Did Kupriyanovich himself have motives for showing a non-working device - for example, to achieve success or recognition? In publications of the 50s, the inventor’s place of work is not indicated; the media present him to readers as a “radio amateur” or “engineer.” However, it is known that Leonid Ivanovich lived and worked in Moscow, he was awarded the academic degree of Candidate of Technical Sciences, he subsequently worked at the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and in the early 60s had a car (for which, by the way, he himself created a radiotelephone and an anti-theft radio alarm) . In other words, by Soviet standards he was a successful person. Doubters can also check a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including the LK-1 adapted for young technicians. From all this it follows that the 1958 mobile phone was built and worked.

Altai-1″ in the late 50s looked like a more realistic project than pocket mobile phones

Unlike Kupriyanovich’s radiophone, Altai had specific customers on whom the allocation of funds depended. In addition, the main problem in implementing both projects was not at all in creating a portable device, but in the need for significant investments and time in creating a communication infrastructure and its debugging and the costs of its maintenance. During the deployment of Altai, for example, in Kyiv, transmitter output lamps failed, and in Tashkent, problems arose due to poor-quality installation of base station equipment. As Radio magazine wrote, in 1968 the Altai system was deployed only in Moscow and Kyiv, followed by Samarkand, Tashkent, Donetsk and Odessa.

In the Altai system, it was easier to provide terrain coverage, because the subscriber could move up to 60 km from the central base station, and outside the city there were enough linear stations located along roads for 40-60 km. Eight transmitters served up to 500-800 subscribers, and the transmission quality was comparable only to digital communications. The implementation of this project looked more realistic than the deployment of a national cellular network based on Radiofon.

However, the idea of ​​a mobile phone, despite its apparent untimeliness, was not buried at all. There were also industrial samples of the device!

Western European countries also attempted to create mobile communications before Cooper's historic call. So, April 11, 1972, i.e. a year earlier, the British company Pye Telecommunications demonstrated at the Communications Today, Tomorrow and the Future exhibition at London's Royal Lancaster Hotel a portable mobile phone that could be used to call the city's telephone network.
The mobile phone consisted of a Pocketphone 70 radio, used by the police, and a set-top box - a handset with a push-button dial that could be held in your hands. The phone operated in the range of 450-470 MHz, judging by the Pocketphone 70 radio, it could have up to 12 channels and was powered by a 15 V source.

There is also information about the existence in France in the 60s of a mobile phone with semi-automatic switching of subscribers. The digits of the dialed number were displayed on dekatrons at the base station, after which the telephone operator manually performed the switching. At the moment, there is no exact data on why such a strange dialing system was adopted; one can only assume that a possible reason was errors in transmitting the number, which were corrected by the telephone operator.

But let's return to the fate of Kupriyanovich. In the 60s, he moved away from creating radio stations and switched to a new direction, lying at the intersection of electronics and medicine - the use of cybernetics to expand the capabilities of the human brain. He publishes popular articles on hypnopedia - methods of teaching a person in a dream, and in 1970 his book “Reserves for Improving Memory” was published by the Nauka publishing house. Cybernetic aspects”, in which, in particular, he examines the problems of “recording” information into the subconscious during a special “sleep at the information level”. To put a person into a state of such sleep, Kupriyanovich creates the Rhythmoson device, and puts forward the idea of ​​​​a new service - mass training of people in their sleep over the phone, and the biocurrents of people control the sleep devices through a central computer.
But this idea of ​​Kupriyanovich remains unrealized, and in his book “Biological Rhythms and Sleep”, published in 1973, the “Ritmoson” apparatus is mainly positioned as a device for the correction of sleep disorders. The reasons, perhaps, should be sought in the phrase from “Reserves for Improving Memory”: “The task of improving memory is to solve the problem of controlling the consciousness, and through it, to a large extent, the subconscious.” For a person in a state of sleep, at the information level, in principle, it is possible to write into memory not only foreign words for memorization, but also advertising slogans, background information designed for unconscious perception, and the person is not able to control this process, and may not even remember whether he is in a state of such sleep. Too many moral and ethical problems arise here, and current human society is clearly not ready for the mass use of such technologies.

Other mobile pioneers have also switched gears.

By the end of the war, Georgy Babat focused on his other idea - transport powered by microwave radiation, made more than a hundred inventions, became a Doctor of Science, was awarded the Stalin Prize, and also became famous as the author of science fiction works.

Alfred Gross continued to work as a microwave and communications specialist for Sperry and General Electric. He continued to create until his death at the age of 82.

In 1967, Hristo Bachvarov took up the radio synchronization system for city clocks, for which he received two gold medals at the Leipzig Fair, headed the Institute of Radioelectronics, and was awarded by the country's leadership for other developments. Later he switched to high-frequency ignition systems in automobile engines.

Martin Cooper headed a small private company, ArrayComm, which is promoting its own fast wireless Internet technology to the market.

Instead of an epilogue. 30 years after the creation of LK-1, on April 9, 1987, at the KALASTAJATORPPA hotel in Helsinki (Finland), General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee M.S. Gorbachev made a mobile call to the USSR Ministry of Communications in the presence of Nokia Vice President Stefan Widomski. Thus, the mobile phone became a means of influencing the minds of politicians - just like the first satellite during the time of Khrushchev. Although, unlike a satellite, a working mobile phone was not actually an indicator of technical superiority - the same Khrushchev was able to call using it...

“Wait!” - the reader will object. “So who should be considered the creator of the first mobile phone - Cooper, Kupriyanovich, Bachvarov?”
It seems that there is no point in contrasting the results of the work here. Economic opportunities for mass use of the new service emerged only in 1990.

It is possible that there were other attempts to create a wearable mobile phone that were ahead of their time, and humanity will someday remember them.

P.S.: thanks to friend ihoraksjuta for an interesting idea.

And from technical interests, I would advise you to remember about The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy was made -

Everyone knows that the telephone was invented by the Americans. Few people remember that the inventor's name was Alexander Graham Bell. However, both are wrong. The US citizen appropriated the idea of ​​the Italian scientist Antonio Meucci, which he expressed when Bell was a foolish boy. Bell really was an inventor, and he received these laurels not entirely in vain.

A. Meucci

This happens not only in science. For example, the musician and singer Boris Grebenshchikov, who wrote many of his own songs, remains in the musical memory thanks to the song to the music of Vladimir Vavilov) and the words of Henri Volokhonsky, sounded in the movie "Assa", and the performer and composer Igor Talkov, despite his original creativity, was best known for the hit song "Chistye Prudy" by composer David Tukhmanov.

The first person to profit from the telephone was the American inventor Alexander Graham Bell, born in Scotland in 1847. But before the talented inventor and founder of a magazine still published in different languages National Geographic patented a telephone that was not invented by him, let's remember his predecessors.

The invention of the telephone would have been impossible without the conversion of sound vibrations into electrical impulses. Already in 1833, such a transformation was put into practice in Göttingen, Germany, by Carl Friedrich Gauß and Wilhelm Eduard Weber.

American physicist Charles Grafton Page (1812-1868) discovered a phenomenon in 1837, which he called galvanic music- "galvanic music". In an electrical circuit consisting of a tuning fork, a horseshoe magnet and a galvanic element, when the tuning fork oscillated, opening and closing the circuit, the electromagnet produced a singing sound.

In general, in the history of the invention of the telephone one can find a complete European international: Germans, French, British, Italians. Some fun facts include, for example, the following story.

The first words transmitted over the telephone were the phrase in German: Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat("A horse doesn't eat cucumber salad"). This historical phrase was uttered on October 26, 1861 by the German physicist and inventor, son of a baker from Gelnhausen, Johann Philipp Reis. But still, the immediate predecessor and inventor, whom fortune did not allow to obtain a legally issued patent, was another person.

A. G. Bell

A native of Florence, Antonio Meucci was a brilliant scientist and a lousy businessman. He was born on April 13, 1808. In addition, this inventive head sympathized with revolutionaries of all stripes, especially the Garibaldians who fought for the liberation of Italy. For which he was sentenced to a month in prison, and in 1835 he went to the island of Cuba. Shortly before his departure to the New World, Meucci married Esther Mochi.

Doca, in connection with various technical innovations, worked for some time in Havana as a leading stage mechanic in a local theater. The couple then moved to New York, where in 1851 he founded one of the first stearin candle factories, then in 1856 Meucci founded a lager brewery, and in 1860 he created the world's first paraffin candle factory.

In 1854, Antonio Meucci, for his wife Esther, suffering from attacks of rheumatism, who often did not leave her room due to pain, came up with a way to transmit a sound signal at a distance. He wrote an article about this to the editor of an Italian-language newspaper published in New York.

The financial independence of the successful inventor was undermined by failures in the stock market and the explosion of the boiler. The accident landed Meucci in a hospital bed for three months in 1866, resulting in his dismissal from his job and forcing his wife to sell some of his working models, including the telephone. However, Meucci later continued his work and filed an application with the US Patent Office in 1871. Financial costs prevented final registration of the invention, and the patent expired in 1873.

Meucci offered his “teletrophon” to be developed by a large American company Western Union Telegraph. Presumably, there was no interest in the invention for a long time. Moreover, in 1874 the author was notified that the description of the technical innovation had been lost. Antonio Meucci died in 1889 in poverty.

On June 11, 2002, the US House of Representatives adopted a resolution recognizing Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone. One of the reasons why the Italian was never recognized during his lifetime as the author of the innovative invention, the bill states that “Meucci never learned English well enough to navigate the intricacies of American business politics.” In other words, Meucci lacked not only knowledge of the English language, but also money for a decent lawyer.