New Cell Phone History Article
I've written a new article on cell phone history for Invention and Technology magazine. You can read it on-line, starting from this link. Look for the article entitled the Cell-Phone Revolution by Tom Farley:
http://www.americanheritage.com/inventionandtechnology/
*****Response to the article*****
Tom,
I came across an interesting citation today. It seems that in 1907 the King Chulalongkorn of Siam was on a visit to Norway. As a part of his travel report there is the following discussion of the potential for what we now call Mobile telephony.
"In the evening they returned to Notodden, and during dinner the king talked with Birkeland (one of the founders of the company Norsk Hydro) about the mysteries of electricity. He heard, among other things about Birkeland's idea about an electrical cannon and an idea about making rain. He also heard that Hydro had inventions and plans on telegraphic communication without wires or cables, but this project was not being pursued. As a result of this, the prophetically king wrote "It is not daring to predict that in the future there might be a portable telephone like a small personal watch. When you want to talk with someone, you can just talk into the watch and then put your ear against it to hear what the other person has said."
The Original Norwegian is: at http://www.almanakken.uio.no/temaartikler/norgesreise_2007b.html
He may have been thinking of crystal radios since it was only about this time that vacuum tubes were being developed by Fleming and De Forest in the US.