Wireless communication is defined as that form of communication that does not depend on interconnecting wires, microwaves, or infrared devices. When humankind first began to communicate on this planet, they communicated wirelessly by using their mouths to tell others information. Over the years, humans have created devices that use wires to carry his voice and information over long distances. The device, which he first used, was a telephone that was connected to other copper wires by a single pair of twisted copper wires. However, as humans began to travel over water or over long
distances on land, they soon needed to send his information farther and faster, so that they could stay in touch with those far away. For a while copper worked but, after a while, copper began to lose its charm, especially when people started to look at the bill for laying copper under the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, humans created a wireless communication device. Since its creation, it has sparked an enormous revolution.
The combining of the theories of two United Kingdom physicists, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, brought about the development of wireless communication by Heinrich Hertz in 1888. Hertz applied their ideas to make a spark-gap transmitter. The spark-gap transmitter was the device
that generated radio waves from an electric spark. In 1895 an Italian electrical engineer, Guglielmo Marconi, extended the transmission range of the spark-gap transmitter. Later, in 1901, Marconi built the first transoceanic telegraph transmitter and, in combination with British professor John Ambrose and American inventor Lee De Forest's studies in vacuum tubes, wireless communication advanced. By the 1930s, after the formation of AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph), two-way radios were commonly used by government personal. However, it was not until the early 1970s when the first cell phone came out.
Today, in 1999, wireless communication makes international and intercontinental calls possible using the combination of fiber optics, cellular antennas, digital technology, and satellites. One thing that most people do not know is how their call from their cellular phone gets across town, or how it gets to a house a thousand miles away. To send a call from a cellular phone across town, it needs to only send its single transmission to the nearest antenna. Once received there, the antenna has the option of either sending the call directly to the receiving party, or relaying it through several antennas before delivering it to the intended party. Even though an American call is made locally, all cell phone calls go to Texas to start the callers' billing time. After the billing process was
under way the call goes back to the town to the receiving party. To make a call across the country, the cellular phone will send the call to the nearest antenna, which will relay the call to Texas to start the billing process which will, in turn, find a secure route on fiber optic lines to an antenna across the country, where that antenna can send the call to the receiving party. To do the last task takes about forty nanoseconds, or forty billionths of a second. The reason that it is possible for cell phones to send and receive calls at the speed of light is because of digital technology.
Wireless communication was humankind's first way of communicating. It is no surprise that mankind's favorite form of communication remains wireless. Today, that is why we have the mobile modem, the cellular phone, and satellites. And even though mankind has used wireless communication for a very long time, modern wireless communication is a most complex technology, which draws on many different things to complete one task. In the future, wireless communication will get cheaper, and it will become more far reaching in its effectiveness.
How do cell phones work?
