The First Mobile Phone Call

On June 17, 1946 history was made when AT&T and Southwestern Bell introduced the first mobile phone. The first call placed was by a driver in St. Louis, Missouri. He picked up the handset from under the dashboard of the car and placed the first mobile phone call. Several people worked together over a decade to make this happen, including D. Mitchell and Alton Dickieson from Bell Labs and H.I. Romnes, who would later become CEO of AT&T.

This was the first commercial mobile radio-telephone service available to private customers. Mobile phone usage became possible due to war technology, which used the very first circuit boards and had recently become commercially available. Also, because of the FCC or Federal Communications Commission, issuing vehicle radio-telephone licenses to Southwestern Bell.

The first mobile phone used the MTS system, or Mobile Telephone Service. Those mobile phones were not like the phones we use today. The “primitive” wireless network roamed from one city neighborhood to the next using a “handoff” system, which is a process of keeping a call going from one zone to another. They only had coverage of about 20 to 25 miles. The first mobile phones were big and heavy. The transmitter and receiver filled the trunk of a car and they weighed 80lbs! While talking on these phones, a person could either talk or listen, but not both at the same time.

These early phones were operated by the user picking up the telephone and pressing a ‘talk’ button. A radio signal was then sent out and picked up by the nearest receiver and transmitted to the operator. The biggest problem these mobile phones had at the time was that there were too few channels to operate on. At most, three subscribers could make calls at one time in any city. Most mobile-telephone systems were only able to have 250 users on at one time. Cost was also prohibitive at a subscription of $15 a month and a charge of 30 to 40 cents per local call.

Though these phones were very primitive, and not what we think of today as being portable, they paved the way for the mobile phone and what it would become.