Cellular phones came about because people wanted to be able to communicate when they were away from a regular telephone.  Before cellular phones, people used radio telephones in their cars.  There were two problems with radio telephones.  Your car needed a powerful transmitter and not many people could use them at the same time, because there weren’t many frequencies to use.

History

Thanks to reaserch from people like Alexander G. Bell, who invented the telophone, and Joe Henry, who did research in electromagnetism, they helped pave the way for cell phone development.  Cellular phones began to be researched in 1947.  An interesting thing about a cell phone is that it is not really a phone, it is a radio.  Researchers discovered that a system with many small cells would let many more conversations go on at once.  Each cell has an antenna with many frequencies.  In 1977, AT&T and Bell Labs built the first cellular system.  So many people were buying cellular phones that the systems quickly became overcrowded.  In 1988, researchers started developing ways that the people could share the frequencies, which let many more people use the cellular system.

Now

Today, everyone (business people, teenagers, old people, adults) use cell phones.  They make business calls, personal calls, and emergency calls.  Cell phones are much less expensive today than they used to be, and the monthly service is cheap, so almost anyone can afford to have one.  New cell phones have new features like games, calculators, calendars, and appointment books.  They even let you have access to the Internet and send and receive e-mail.  The new phones are becoming smaller, even though they have all of these new features.

Later

For the future, researchers are looking into how to allow more callers to be on the system, how to make the quality of the calls better, how to allow people to get signals everywhere.  Everyone will benefit from this research because more people will be able to use cell phones and have better calls.  Who knows, maybe one day everyone in the world will have a cell-phone that is clear, as small as a pin, and does anything you want it to do!