The Past of the Development of Mobile Phone Functions
Yu-Hsuan Chen 03/15/2009
The development of mobile phone functions
The intention of this term project is to examine past, present phone functions and to explore the potential functionalities in future mobile phones. The whole project is going to be written in two separated papers. A historic review of the technological progress in mobile telephony and the social context at that time is given in the first paper. Through a careful examination into the momentous historic events in the technical development process of telephone, radio and subsequent mobile telephony, as well as how the society reflected upon these events, people can gain valuable knowledge and insight into how technological, economic, political and social factors intertwined to affect the treatment, adoption and diffusion of innovative communications technologies. With rapid technical progress, the mobile communications had been transferred from analogue to digital, the physical mobile devices were made of from vacuum tubes to transistors, and the communication services had extended from voice to data and more. Likewise, the mobile phone has exhibited unlimited creativeness on its functionalities. The second paper will firstly investigate the strength and weakness of present handset functions as well as currently developing technologies, which are promising to be implemented as new functions on the next-generation small gadgets. Eventually, by linking the past experience into modern mobile development, we are able to paint a much clear picture which helps people not only look at the past to gain a perspective on the present but also predict and imagine what mobile phones you will have in the near future.
The development of mobile phone functions: The Past
History is like a mirror reflecting ever-repeating stories around our life. This paper aims to bring us into the past seeing momentous historic events in the phone development. I will cast the history back from the birth of telephony to the early stage of the second-generation cell phones – Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) – in 2000. The evolution of communication theory will be included to analyze how the innovation process drove our communications technologies moving forward as well as how the society slowed down the adoption and diffusion of innovative technologies. From this paper, people can figure out not only “where did mobile phones come from?” but also how technological, economic, and political forces came together to shape the history of mobile phone development.
The Birth of Telephone
“Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!” (Winston, 1998)
On 10 March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell credited as the inventor of telephony made the first telephone call in his Boston laboratory, summoning his assistant from the next room. This unveiled the advent of a new era in communications history. Winston described Bell was born into a family of speech instructors and had a lifelong interest in the nature of sound (Winston, 1998). At that time, communications over long distance was achieved by sending telegraph signals through fixed wires. Telegraph operators encoded messages, sent these code words via electric impulses over the wires, and at the other end, operators received signals and completed the communications process by deciphering these codes into original messages. This triggered Bell to investigate the possibility of using an electrical apparatus to deliver human voice. However, the idea was not unique. Bell competed with scientists like Elisha Gray or others to find ways transforming voice into electricity and then restoring electrical signals back into clear voice. After hard working for several years, on 14 February 1876, Bell filed his telephone patent on the very same day as Gray did. Although the patent battle was full of controversy due to the failure of Bell’s phone prototype (Winston, 1998), the date set up the milestone in modern communications history.
In the beginning, the promotion of Bell’s innovative device was not smoothly. As the Western Union president William said, “ What use could this company make of an electrical toy?” (Christensen, 2004) Western Union, the leading telegraphy company in the United States, was initially not interested in the new invention, when Gardiner Hubbard, Bell’s financial supporter, introduced Bell’s patent to Western Union and hoped to enhance its telegraph systems in 1882. Three years later, Bell and his partners founded American Telephone and Telegraphy (AT&T) Company to provide telephone services all over the nation. After a period of intense competition and patent fights (Goggin, 2006), AT&T Corporation achieved its monopoly status in the telecommunication industry.
The telephone industry is descended directly from the telegraph industry (Fisher 1992). For instance, both industries shared the same basic infrastructure such as wires, switches, offices and so on. Most important of all, the marketing strategies of the telephone industry followed those of the telegraph industry. Fisher observed that the telephone service understood by marketers very much revolved around the business usage, modeled on the example of the telegraph. The telephone service for business usage was the first priority for their marketers and little attention was paid to marketing residential uses. It is not until the 1920s that the use of the telephone for sociality and marketing plans diverted to the household became an acceptable focus. Since then, the ratio of people using the telephone for social purposes rose to great heights. The remarkable success in the promotion of telephone service into household indicated that its initial marketing strategy derived from the telegraph was not successfully adapted to the telephone, even though the function of both systems looks alike. The history of the uses of the phone offers us an instructive lesson for thinking about subsequent innovative technology in communications. The initial purpose of a technology may not be the correct or complete solution to the original problem it is supposed to solve. The promoters of a technology do not necessarily decide its final uses instantly and assertively. On the contrary, they should leave enough room and time for the technology to interact with the society. The technology consumers would spontaneously find the answer and eventually decide how to use it. It’s an interactive process that the technology brings impact upon the society and the society also adjusts itself to reflect on it, just like the memorable quote “life will find a way” in the famous movie, Jurassic Park (1993).
Voice on the Air: Radio
Hamil and Lasen (2005) showed that there are drawbacks to the telephone system. One of the obvious is that in order to use the phone, one has to be at home, or at the office, or at any place where the wires of the fixed network can reach. There was no way of using a telephone while on the road. For most casual users this is not a big problem, but it did not help to fulfill the dream of ease of communication to connect anywhere and at anytime to their social networks. Once again, the imperfections of the medium prompted the search for better solutions.
Radio technology came into the world at a time when the telegraph and telephone dominated the way people thought of communication media. It can transmit electromagnetic wave free from fixed wires and without the limitation of so-called point-to-point link to which both the telephone and telegraph are subject. As long as the radio wave can reach, people can receive it at any place or while on the move. Hence, the radio seems as a promising technology to replace the telephone as a new communication medium and accomplish the dream of ideal communications that people can talk on the go. However, the properties of the radio wave, being able to reach any point unhindered, having no specific destination and potentially being picked up by anyone with a receiver were initially seen defective (Hamill& Lasen, 2005). Just like the mention above, technology would find its place in the society beyond our original schemes. In the early twentieth century, especially after World War II, the radio practice extremely succeeded and was widely used in broadcasting providing entertainment and reporting news. Meanwhile, the development of radiotelephony suffered more challenges to make it widespread and easy to use.
Mobile Telephony
Cowan (1997) showed that the beginning of the Mobile Telephony can be traced back to the time when the Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, filed a patent for his wireless telegraph apparatus in England in 1896. When Marconi was young, he noticed a radio experiment conducted by Hertz, a German scientist being recognized as the first man to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. Hertz designed an apparatus that can send radio waves from on place and receive in another. Marconi soon figured out the true potentiality behind this experiment, and devised a device sending messages in Morse code over several miles without wires. Soon after his invention, Marconi found the business field for his invention in Navy and ocean shipping. He earned wealth instantly and made the wireless telegraph being widely noticed, particularly after the apparatus saved over 700 persons in the Titanic disaster in 1912 (Goggin, 2006).
While Marconi’s wireless telegraphy gained great success, some Americans started to pioneer wireless telephony. In Cowan’s book (1997), in the early years of the nineteenth century, the Canadian Reginald Fessenden and the American Lee De Forest designed some electronic devices respectively that could transmit and capture continuous radio waves. These devices were regarded as the key components for wireless telephony, because, unlike the electric telegraph sending intermittent electric pulses, voice transmission requires continuous waves. Both of them founded companies to manage wireless telegraphy and telephone business, but they didn’t succeed. The wireless telephony business was not valued much at that time for two main reasons. Firstly, the voice quality of the wireless telephone could not match that of Bell’s wired telephones such that both men failed in sharing the telephone market. Moreover, De Forest’s apparatus showed no strong advantages and incentives over Marconi’s wireless telegraph that dominated the European and American wireless telegraph market at that time and finally Marconi merged De Forest’s company. Although De Forest didn’t succeed in wireless telephony, his invented device finally found its place in radio broadcasting and he was credited as the father of American radio (Mike, 2003).
According to the Fisher (1992), the first land mobile use was the Detroit Police Department in 1921. The Detroit Police Department used the mobile service for its police car dispatch. Once patrolmen were being paged, they would need to find a wireline telephone to call back (Steinbock, 2003). It’s not long for the one-way radio. A less bulky two-way radio called ‘Motorola’ was designed in 1932 and successfully became the market leader in two-way radio communications. The first portable radiotelephone launched in 1943 and by 1952, 350,000 two-way mobile radiotelephones were in use (Steinbock, 2003). All the above two-way radio communications were not like today’s mobile phone services. They were just like the Walkie-Talkie that you push a button and send your voice to a specific device having the same radio channel with yours. In 1946, AT&T and Southwestern Bell launched the first commercial mobile radiotelephone service in St. Louis, Missouri, allowing calls from fixed phones to mobile users. Since then, various advanced communications techniques emerged and AT&T Corporation had continued improving its mobile services. More than 1.5 million users ever used AT&T mobile services, when it introduced its ‘Improved Mobile Telephone System’ (IMTS) by 1964. Even though the voice service provided by AT&T was relatively poor and the portable mobile phones were bulky, the initial AT&T commercial mobile service set the tone for the rising and flourishing development of modern mobile industry.
During the radiotelephone era, broadcasting radio, private two-way radio, wireless telegraph and other electromagnetic waves all came into the air, such that the sky started feeling crowded. The frequency spectrum for radio transmission became inadequate. Some of which interfered with each other and some of which were too close to be distinguished by radio apparatuses. Especially, the American Navy concerned about the interference with its military messages. The American government proposed The Radio Licensing Act of 1912 to deal with the issue of the insufficiency of radio frequency spectrum (Goggin, 2006). The Radio Licensing Act of 1912 allowed the American government taking control of frequency spectrum. The one who possesses transmitting equipments must have a license issued by the federal government and wireless operators have to pass the examination set by the government. The Radio Licensing Act of 1912 authorizes the federal government having the right to allocate frequency spectrum and therefore brings huge influence on communications techniques and wireless industry.
The development of the telephone system gives us a clear-cut example of applying Winston’s theory (1998) to examine how a technology formed, accelerated and repressed. Bell filed his telephone patent on the very same day as Gray did. Marconi developed his wireless apparatus to transmit radio waves over long distances and filed the first patent of wireless communications in 1890s. A.S. Popoff of Russia was doing similar works during the same period. These communications technologies emerged almost simultaneously and they followed a similar history pattern in many ways. In the end of eighteenth century, scientists discovered the electricity phenomenon. From then on, various technologies surrounding electricity are brought into existence. Science strode across the gap inside the social sphere and had been transformed into technological performance. At that time, the first transform – ideation – from the underlying scientific electromagnetic theory to practical wireless communication systems had done. Some prototypes for scientific experiments were gotten noticed and scientific theory paved the ground for inspired ambitious technological pioneers to explore their imagination. These accepted prototypes were unceasingly modified, enhanced and improved to achieve the dream of ideal communications.
“The triumph of the telegraph, despite the initial bewilderment and skepticism that greeted it, had demonstrated the futility of resisting the inevitable; further technological advances were shortly to have a devastating impact on the telegraph and the community that had sprung up around it.” (Standage, 1998) New technology displaces many necessities that we used before and it continues changing everyday. In the next 80 years after the invention of telegraph, many wireless communication techniques were developed and then various derivative wireless communication systems were created and widely applied to commercial and military fields. During this period, supervening social necessities greatly impacted upon the development and diffusion of wireless communications, especially stimulated by World War II. However, the volume of these devices for sending and receiving radio waves is too large to be portable at hand. Therefore, the usage of wireless communication is limited in fixed areas. The Radio Licensing Act of 1912 was also a negative force to hinder the mobile industry to move forward. The policy of limited frequency spectrum for commercial use directly led to a recession in wireless market. It’s until the invention of transistors and digital communications techniques that the mobile industry starts to experience another market growth. Thanks to the invention of transistors, the size of wireless communication devices shrinks so largely that people can carry on the go. With the help of semiconductor technology, the market of personal mobile communications is boosted rapidly and the modern commercial communication systems achieves remarkable success in the mobile industry.
Transistorized and Digital Age
Before the invention of transistors, the mobile terminals equipped with electronic vacuum tubes were large, heavy, had high power consumption, needed shock-protected mountings, and were expensive. The vacuum tubes made the mobile telephony cumbersome and unreliable to use. To keep the telephone business to continue to grow, in the 1930s, AT&T Corporation realized that a better electronic device was needed to displace the vacuum tube. In 1947, three American physicists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain invented the transistor. The features of transistors – relatively small size, low power dissipation and high reliability – enable the development of portable mobile phones; making the dream of personal communications on the go into fruition. (Julian, 2007)
Another breakthrough accompanying with the transistorized is the digital technology. This innovative technology uses a binary code consisting of zeros and ones to represent physical continuous/analogue waveforms, like voice, electricity and light in Nature. What is it that makes the digital technology different from what has done before? Hamil and Lasen (2005) used three key features to characterize the digital technology. First of all, it reduces information. By using the binary code, digital engineers can utilize effective approaches to represent sounds, images, and videos economically and efficiently. This means that the capacity required for storing these encoded binary data is minimized. Hence, the information is easy to store and it is very cheap to store very large quantities of data. Thirdly, transmission of digital data is rather robust. Digital communications experts devised various schemes to protect digital data during transmission and reproduce information reliably. Almost nothing is loss in transmission and reproduction. These features of digital technologies open up a whole new window for the mobile phone design. The powerful technology makes mobile phones not only as a talking tool, but also allows people to store data and exchange information through their mobiles. The functions of data storage and transmission enable rich data services on the mobiles afterward such as texting, picture messaging, etc. This epochal technology has led people to re-think the role of mobile phone could play in our daily life and brought endless amazing services and functions to costumers till now.
Both of the breakthrough technologies underlay modern communications. The mobile services become diverse, the handsets are small but powerful than ever and the impact upon human culture is pervasive and deep.
Conclusion
This innovation process takes nearly 100 years from telephones, radio, and early radiotelephones to contemporary personal mobile handsets. During this long period, supervening social necessities promote communications technology to progress; however, certain opposite force, the law of suppression, seems to brake our advance in mobile communications. Incorrect marketing strategies and inadequate government actions placed constraints on the mobile development. There are arguments for government Acts and judgments. The Radio Licensing Act might somehow repress the diffusion and development of modern communications but regulates the usage of radio spectrum to stabilize the mobile market. To optimize the usage of precious frequency spectrum, engineers and enterprisers create various novel techniques to lead us into today’s communication world. In the next paper, we’ll see how the positive supervening social necessities and the negative suppression law interactively affect the development of present mobile functions and hope to indicate a way to move into the future.
Reference
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