Santorum: ‘People 20 years ago couldn’t conceive of a cell phone’

[fishwax]

68. 1948 was basically when cell phone technology was actually invented at Bell Labs

If I'm not mistaken -- it may have been a year or two before or a year or two after, but it was right around that time.

There were a few car phone services at the time (St. Louis was the first city to get automobile phone service in 1946) that basically used two-way radio technology and then an operator would patch the call into the phone system. But frequency restrictions severely limited the number of possible subscribers. They found a solution at Bell Labs in 1948 or so, but Ma Bell didn't invest the resources to fully develop it (they believed they could pressure the government for more frequencies, thus solving the problem). When cell phone technology started to develop in earnest in the 1970s, they used the same basic idea from Bell Labs in the '40s. (Can't remember the name of the guy who came up with the solution, alas.)

Anyway, kind of interesting. Cell phone (and the car phone) have a much longer history than most folks realize. Certainly more than 20 years