Europe saw cellular service introduced in 1981, when the Nordic Mobile Telephone System (internal link) or NMT450 began operating in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway in the 450 MHz range. It was the first multinational cellular system. It was also close to being the first all digital cellular service. Unlike AMPS, which used digital routines and tones for signalling, NMT used all digital or binary signalling. No tones. NMT could have been a fully digital system with digitized voice, but technology for that hadn't quite developed. As Knut Flottorp expalins:

"NMT was before its time, fully digital, TDMA, on SS7 signalling. They did not make a voice codec that could work fast enough, nor would be affordable. So it was digital switching of analog voice. The system then had the benefit of extreme coverage -- where reception would degrade gracefully and cover as far as 25 miles."

For more on the hard to research NMT, click here to read Staffan Hultén's history of the project:

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Well, sort of. AG Communication Systems (external link), a subsidiary of Lucent Technologies, claims parentage of A.E. It thus marks the triumph of the now defunct Western Electric against its greatest and oldest rival, Automatic Electric. Which is also now defunct. It is as if two ghosts have finished a battle that their corporeal forms did not complete in life. Check out the time line below which comes from the A.G. site.

Click to enlarge

Rather than disappearing completely in the mid 1980s, remnants of GTE's manufacturing arm continued on, being absorbed by AG Communication Systems in 1989. The "A", by the way, stands for AT&T, and the "G" for General Telephone and Electronics. A.G. contains many old Western Electric elements, especially Lucent, which continues to manufacture telecom equipment, much to telephone companies formerly of the Bell System.

A.G.'s ownership settles a David and Goliath type battle that raged for nearly one hundred years. In this case, Goliath won, but it does not diminish the contributions A.E. made over the years, particularly with Strowger or step by step switching equipment. Steppers were the first workable system that allowed automatic dialing, letting people place calls without an operator. A.E.'s steppers let Automatic Electric and the independent telephone companies keep close to Bell System's subscribership levels until the early 1920s. Read more about these things in my telephone history series.

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Almon Strowger is the father of automatic telephone switching (internal link). Caroline Densham from the United Kingdom writes:

"Hello, Tom. I thought you might be interested in the background of Almon Strowger. Did you know his family came from England ? My hobby is genealogy and I have just linked my family with Almon and his ancestors in Suffolk, England. He is my fourth cousin. Here's some background, starting with Almon's grandfather's decision to move to America."

"About 1790 John Strogier married Charlotte Jennings, daughter of a titled man who disowned her, and this is the most likely reason why he and his wife decided to emigrate. Although a son from a prosperous family, John would have had great difficulty succeeding in Suffolk where his marriage had offended his rich and influential father-in-law."."

"For whatever reason, they did move to America, landing in Norfolk, Virginia. Charlotte gave birth to a child either aboard ship or in Norfolk. Both mother and child died. After her death, John sold personal belongings which consisted of very expensive household goods and moved to Hudson, New York, where he worked for Gouldrite Oil Company for a year. He then married Margaret Scott and had six children the eldest being Samuel Strowger born June 14,1797 in Kinderhook, Columbia County, New York."

"Samuel married his second wife Jane Clark on January 1st, 1827 and Almon was christened on October 19, 1839 in Penfield, Monroe County, New York. Almon had a varied career commencing as a trumpeter in the Civil War. The 1860 census shows him as farm hand in Reserve Township, Parke County, Indiana. The 1880 census lists him as a teacher. In 1889 he was an undertaker. On August 31, 1891 Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company was founded with half the stock controlled by Almon Strowger and nephew Walter S Strowger. I hope you find these details of interest."

Best, Caroline Densham

Links:

http://www.roserpark.net/ (external link) Shows the grave of Almon Strowger

http://www.agcs.com/aboutv2/history/

index.htm (external link, now dead) History timeline at AGCS, showing how their company began with Strowger and his invention.

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Interested in mobile telephone and cellular telephone history? Besides reading my long article on the subject, be sure to scan Joel Engel's and Donald Cox's oral interviews at the IEEE site. Cox and Engel are both former Bell System employees, both pioneers of cellular. Keep something in mind while you read. Because Bell System history is so well documented it is easy to think Bell Labs and Western Electric alone developed cellular. They did not. In America, Motorola contributed a great deal, providing much competition to the Bell System Around the world, the Scandinavians and the Japanese built cellular networks by themselves and in time frames slightly before AT&T's commercial systems. The Japanese company, Oki, not Western Electric, supplied the Bell System's car mounted cellular telephones.

Joel Engel:

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history

_center/oral_histories/transcripts/engel.html

Donald Cox:

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history

_center/oral_histories/transcripts/cox.html

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