Mobile radio telephone

Mobile radio telephony emerged on June 17, 1946, when a driver in St. Louis pulled a handset from under his dashboard and placed the first call on the world's commercial mobile telephone system. AT&T's Bell System had spent more than a decade developing the technology. The adjacent possible had aligned: FM radio matured during World War II, the telephone network provided switching infrastructure, and urban markets demanded communication on the move.

The system's limitations revealed why cellular would take another four decades. Equipment weighed 80 pounds and filled most of a car's trunk. Six channels—later reduced to three due to interference—served each city. Users pressed a button to talk, released it to listen, and waited for operators to manually connect calls. In mid-1960s New York, 2,000 users shared just 12 channels, enduring average wait times of 30 minutes for connections.

The technology could have advanced faster. In 1947, Bell System proposed a broadband urban mobile system requesting 40 MHz of spectrum. The FCC denied the request, instead allocating 470-890 MHz to television—creating 17,010 TV station slots across 210 markets. By 1962, only 603 stations actually broadcast. Vast spectrum sat idle while mobile telephone customers waited years for service. A 1991 study concluded cellular could have been operational by 1973 had the FCC proceeded from its 1970 allocation decision.

The transistor, invented at Bell Labs in 1947, would eventually enable pocket-sized phones. But regulatory capture—broadcasters defending idle bandwidth, equipment manufacturers fearing competition, even Motorola lawyers lobbying against cellular buildout despite the company's VP making the first cellular call in 1973—delayed mobile telephony's transformation for a generation. The first U.S. cellular system finally launched in Chicago in 1983, nearly four decades after St. Louis proved the concept worked.