In many ways the father of the mobile phone was Reginald Aubrey Fessenden. He was Canadian and lived from 1866 until 1932. He was an inventor of many things, but his primary obsession was with all things in radio. It is said by some that he was the first person to transmit voice and music.

In science and mathematics he was something of a child protégé and by the age of 16 he himself was teaching mathematics, though he failed to get a degree. He was able to get a job with Thomas Edison’s company ‘Edison Machine Works’ laying underground electrical cables. He progressed rapidly and within a few years he was working for Edison himself, though due to financial difficulties with the company after a few years Fessenden was made redundant.

He worked for several other organisations and eventually he became professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University where, inspired by Guglielmo Marconi, he began work on radio and soon he believed that he could improve on Marconi’s designs, and he became the first person to develop a continuous wave transmitter. The system he devised was amplitude modulation of a signal produced by a high speed alternator.

Constructing one proved to be a difficult goal, though eventually several prototypes were constructed and one of these was used to transmit music and speech to an audience located over a hundred miles away. He went on to demonstrate two way communications between shore and ship which essentially was the first mobile phone.

Radio phones continued to be developed but these would always be limited by the need to maintain separate radio frequencies and the mobile phone as we know it today needed a new approach. This was the development of cellular networks which permitted calls to be transferred between cells and permitted reuse of radio frequencies. The first implementation of this system was in Japan in 1979, almost a hundred years after Reginald Aubrey Fessenden demonstrated his ship to shore communications system.Now a days there are thousands of mobile phones available on the market from specialist shops such as Dialaphone to big supermarket chains such as Tesco.