Biography. The first mobile phones Mobile phone LK 1 Kupriyanovich pdf

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Mobile phones could well have appeared in the USSR, say, more than half a century ago. More precisely, then the new product would have a different name - an individual radiophone. And then from everywhere - from the street, from a store, from a tram or metro car - the owners of a small box with a tube could contact their family, friends, and acquaintances.

Fantastic? Yes, but based on real facts.

Instead of a sensation - an ordinary event

Once upon a time there lived a young man whose name was Leonid Kupriyanovich. In 1953, he graduated from the Faculty of Instrument Engineering at the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical University with a degree in Radioelectronics. 60 years ago - in November 1957, he received a patent for a “Device for calling and switching radiotelephone communication channels,” which outlined the basics of mobile telephony.

Soon information about the new product appeared in the journal Science and Life. It was a very popular publication, partly because the daughter of the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee worked there Khrushchev — Rada Adzhubey. “So far there are only prototypes of the new device,” Kupriyanovich told the publication’s correspondent, “but there is no doubt that it will soon become widespread in transport, in the city telephone network, in industry, on construction sites...”

Harbinger of the future

Kupriyanovich, who became extremely popular, gave an interview to another magazine, “Behind the Wheel.” In the photo he is shown dialing a number from his LK-1 phone while sitting in a car. “By taking such a radiophone with you, you are essentially taking an ordinary telephone set, but without wires,” said the engineer. - No matter where you are, you can always be found by phone, you just have to dial the known number of your radiophone from any landline phone (even from a pay phone). There's a sound in your pocket phone call, and you start a conversation. If necessary, you can dial any city telephone number directly from a tram, trolleybus, or bus, call " Ambulance“, fire or emergency vehicle, contact home...”

Truly, Kupriyanovich was a harbinger of the future! He looked into our 21st century and saw people for whom mobile phones have become an integral part of life. After all, many do not part with a glowing and talking rectangle, day or night!

The inventor not only theorized, but also showed a prototype of an automatic mobile phone he had created. At first, the LK-1 apparatus weighed three kilograms, but soon the engineer introduced disk device weighing 500 grams. But that’s all - in 1961, Kupriyanovich’s radiophone lightened up to 70 grams!

He not only showed his invention, but also called on it and received responses from subscribers. People were surprised when they found out what device the engineer was using to contact them. By the way, his phone worked on semiconductors and was powered by nickel-cadmium batteries.

“Darling, are you on your way already?”

Cellular communications originated in the early 70s of the last century, when its foundations appeared in a report by the Bell System to the US Communications Commission. In 1974, frequency bands were allocated on which the system began to operate cellular communications. The first mobile phones cost several thousand dollars, and the subscription fee for them was quite substantial. But this could not stop rich people. It was very prestigious! How nice it was to press the button and hear the cooing voice of your beloved woman: “Darling, are you on your way already? Then I cool the wine and put the meat in the oven..."

American Martin Cooper, Motorola employee made the first call on his cell phone on April 3, 1973. This happened about 15 years after Kupriyanovich's experience. But it was Cooper who is considered the pioneer of mobile communications. In a year he will turn 90 years old, and surely this event will be widely celebrated throughout the world. Few even in Russia know the name of the Soviet engineer...

According to Kupriyanovich, to serve a city like Moscow, only ten automatic telephone radio stations were required. The first of them was supposed to appear in the new Moscow district of Mazilovo. One of the most authoritative agencies of the Soviet Union, APN, announced that latest model The new device is prepared for serial production at one of the Soviet enterprises.

So, the technological revolution was already on the threshold! All that remained was to take the last, decisive step.

Phone or motorcycle

Let us turn to a fragment of material entitled “Phone without wires,” written by a correspondent of another reputable agency - TASS: “A man is walking down the street. From his pocket he takes out a small device that resembles an ordinary telephone. Dials desired number. The caller’s voice is clearly heard in the microphone built into the device:

- They are listening to you.

And the conversation took place...

This device is called a radiophone or, even more simply, an automatic radiotelephone. It is not connected by wires directly to the city telephone exchange (PBX). Communication is carried out differently. A special automatic telephone radio station (ATR) is installed on the PBX. It is here that a call from any radiophone is transmitted over the air. Then this signal automatically goes to the telephone exchange, and then through the wires in the usual way..."

It is worth noting that Kupriyanovich was an employee of a closed research institute or, as they put it then, a “mailbox”, and was engaged in mobile communications only in his free time. This, firstly, could attract the attention of jealous superiors: “Are you doing hack work? Do you have time to do your work?” Secondly, employees of the Soviet secret services could pay attention to the new product. And - get worried. They didn’t have enough trouble with wiretapping regular landline phones, so now they have to tinker with “mobile phones” too...

But these are versions. It is not really known why Kupriyanovich’s invention did not enter the lives of Soviet people. Although the innovator, inspired by success, predicted that his phones would soon go on sale and cost about 400 rubles. After the monetary reform of 1961, a red Czech Java motorcycle, the dream of many young people, was sold at approximately the same price. Of course, this was not small money, but a person, say, with a salary of 200-250 rubles a month could choose between a real motorcycle and a virtual mobile phone.

Mobile phone in the car

Alas, the broad masses never received Kupriyanovich’s radiophones. But devices for a narrow circle - government officials, party leaders, directors of large enterprises, police officers - appeared. They were served by the Altai-1 radiotelephone connection, designed for only a thousand subscribers throughout the Soviet Union. True, the devices were only in company cars, and it was impossible to carry them with you. But this was enough - the faithful driver was almost always at the phone and, if necessary, could immediately call the boss.

Kupriyanovich's experience has found application in Bulgaria. At one of the international exhibitions in the mid-60s, the Radioelectronics company presented a mobile phone with a base station for 15 subscribers. Its developers used a system developed by a Soviet engineer.

Leonid Ivanovich himself, by the way a candidate of technical sciences, did not improve his brainchild. Why, you ask. And there is no answer to this question. Perhaps the engineer saw a lack of prospects due to insufficient attention from his superiors. And - he moved to the Academy of Medical Sciences. There Kupriyanovich again achieved success - he created the Rhythmoson device, which controlled the human condition, and published scientific works on improving memory. They say that many government officials turned to the scientist for help.

Kupriyanovich was probably very talented person, but left its mark only in mobile telephony. But Kupriyanovich could be on a par with the great inventors, and they would talk about him, and not about Cooper, as the person who first showed the world mobile communications.

Blatant injustice

Other Soviet scientists also tried their hand at this area. The principles of mobile telephony were presented - not just anywhere, but in besieged Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War - by the inventor Georgy Babat. It was assumed that his phone would have voice recorder and answering machine functions. Babat's drawings were classified, and he himself was sent to work at a closed radio institute, advised to keep his mouth shut...

Vladimir Nemtsov, a military engineer and writer who was involved in secret developments of military radio stations during the war, also worked in the field of mobile telephony. His invention, however, was not very convenient - it weighed 15 kilograms, primarily due to the batteries and due to its operation on large lamps...

Many have probably watched the science fiction film " back side Moon" - about the adventures of police captain Mikhail Solovyov. The action of the first part takes viewers to the 70s; the second part of the series shows the USSR, which strangely survived until the beginning of the 21st century. Amazing customs reign there - one of the streets is named after the singer Kirkorov, there is a ban on chewing gum and tobacco. You cannot purchase foreign products; cigarettes are considered drugs.

Residents of this mythical USSR use “pocket” phones - mobile devices, but not the push-button ones we are used to, but primitive ones, with disks. It seems that in the country invented by filmmakers, they remembered the invention of Leonid Kupriyanovich. But, alas, his name is not mentioned in the film “The Far Side of the Moon”. And in general, the inventor is virtually forgotten. And this is a blatant injustice.

The very first mobile phone in the world was created by the Soviet engineer Kupriyanovich L.I. in 1957. The device was named LK-1.

Kupriyanovich L.I. and his LK-1 - the very first mobile phone in the world

1957

The weight of the portable mobile phone LK-1 was 3 kg. The battery charge was enough for 20-30 hours of operation, the range was 20-30 km. The solutions used in the phone were patented on November 1, 1957.

1958

By 1958, Kupriyanovich had reduced the weight of the device to 500. It was a box with toggle switches and a dial for dialing numbers. An ordinary telephone handset was connected to the box. There were two ways to hold the device during a call. Firstly, you could use two hands to hold the tube and box, which is not convenient. Or you could hang the box on your belt, then use only one hand to hold the tube.

The question arises why Kupriyanovich used a handset and did not build speakers into the phone itself. The fact is that using the tube was considered more convenient because of its lightness; it is much easier to hold a plastic tube weighing a few grams than the entire apparatus. As Martin Cooper later admitted, using his very first mobile phone helped him build up his muscles quite well. According to Kupriyanovich’s calculations, if the device was put into mass production, its cost could be 300-400 rubles, which was approximately equal to the cost of a TV.

1961

In 1961, Kupriyanovich demonstrated a telephone weighing 70 grams, which fit in the palm of your hand and had a range of 80 km. It used semiconductors and a nickel-cadmium battery. There was also a smaller version of the dial dial. The disk was small and was not intended to be rotated with fingers; most likely it was intended to be used with a pen or pencil. The plans of the creator of the very first cell phone in the world were to create a portable phone the size of a matchbox and a range of 200 km. It is quite possible that such a device was created, but was used only by special services.

1963

In 1963, the Altai mobile phone was released in the USSR. The development of the device began in 1958 at the Voronezh Research Institute of Communications. The designers created subscriber stations (phones themselves) and base stations that ensured stable communication between subscribers. It was originally intended for installation in ambulances, taxis, and trucks. However, later, for the most part, officials at various levels began to use them.

By 1970, the Altai telephone was used in 30 Soviet cities. The device made it possible to create conferences, for example, a manager could simultaneously communicate with several subordinates. Each owner of the Altai phone had his own possibilities for using it. Some had the opportunity to call other countries, some to phones in a specific city, and some only to specific numbers.

Early 60s

In the early 60s, the Bulgarian engineer Hristo Bachvarov created a model of a portable telephone, for which he received the Dimitrov Prize. The sample was demonstrated to Soviet cosmonauts, including Alexei Leonov. Unfortunately, the device was not put into mass production, since this required transistors of Japanese and American production. A total of two samples were created.

1965

In 1965, based on the developments of L. I. Kupriyanovich, the creator of the very first mobile phone in the world, the Bulgarian company Radioelectronics created a mobile communication kit consisting of a handset-sized mobile phone and base station for 15 rooms. The device was presented at the Moscow exhibition "Inforga-65".

1966

In 1966, at the Interorgtekhnika-66 exhibition held in Moscow, Bulgarian engineers demonstrated the ATRT-05 and PAT-05 telephone models, which were later put into production. They were used on construction sites and energy facilities. Initially, one RATC-10 base station served only 6 numbers. Later this number increased to 69, and then to 699 numbers.

1967

In 1967, the Carry Phone Co. (USA, California) introduced the Carry Phone mobile phone. Externally, the mobile phone was a standard diplomat, to which a telephone handset was connected. His weight was 4.5 kg. At incoming call Short calls were heard inside the diplomat, after which it was necessary to open the diplomat and answer the call.

As for outgoing calls, the Carry Phone was very inconvenient. In order to make an outgoing call, it was necessary to select one of 11 channels, after which the operator connected with the telephone company, and that, in turn, connected the owner of the device with a specific number. This was not convenient for the owner of the phone, but nevertheless made it possible to use the already existing infrastructure of the car radiotelephone. The cost of the Carry Phone was 3 thousand dollars.

1972

On April 11, 1972, Pye Telecommunications (Britain) introduced its portable telephone, thanks to which its owner could call any landline number. The 12-channel device consisted of a Pocketphone 70 walkie-talkie and a small box with buttons for dialing numbers.

1973

On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, head of Motorola's mobile communications division, unveiled a prototype cell phone called the DynaTAC. Many believe that this particular device is the very first cell phone in the world, but this is not so. His weight was 1.15 kg. The battery charge was enough for 35 minutes of operation; recharging required 10 hours. There was an LED display that showed only the numbers being dialed.

Usually the history of the creation of a mobile phone is told something like this.

On April 3, 1973, the head of Motorola's mobile communications division, Martin Cooper, was walking through the center of Manhattan and decided to make a call on his cell phone. The mobile phone was called Dyna-TAC and looked like a brick, weighed more than a kilogram, and had a talk time of only half an hour.

It is believed that until this point, other mobile telephones that a person can carry with him, like a watch or notebook, did not exist. There were walkie-talkies, there were “mobile” phones that could be used in a car or train, but there was no such thing for just walking down the street.

Moreover, until the early 1960s, many companies generally refused to conduct research in the field of creating cellular communications, because they came to the conclusion that, in principle, it was impossible to create a compact cellular telephone device. And none of the specialists from these companies paid attention to the fact that on the other side of the Iron Curtain, photographs began to appear in popular science magazines depicting... a man talking on a mobile phone. (For those in doubt, the numbers of the magazines where the pictures were published will be given, so that everyone can be sure that this is not a graphics editor).

Hoax? Joke? Propaganda? An attempt to misinform Western electronics manufacturers (this industry, as is known, was of strategic military importance)? Maybe we are just talking about an ordinary walkie-talkie?
However, further searches led to a completely unexpected conclusion - Martin Cooper was not the first person in history to call on a mobile phone. And not even second.

2. YOUTH BELIEVE IN MIRACLES.

The man in the photo from the magazine “Science and Life” was named Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich, and it was he who turned out to be the person who made the cell phone call 15 years before Cooper. But before we talk about this, let us remember that the basic principles of mobile communications have a very, very long history.

Portable VHF transmitter. “Radiofront”, 16, 1936

However, the Soviet science fiction “Close Sight” had already informed people about the possibility of replacing telephones with such radio installations. In the chapters of the novel “Generator of Miracles” published in the first issue of the magazine “Technology for Youth” in 1939, the writer Yuri Dolgushin, through the mouth of his hero, engineer Tungusov, proclaimed:
“- Modern telephone- already archaic. The telephone network is growing literally every day. Can you imagine how cumbersome our underground facilities will soon become if we continue to connect each device to the regional station with a special wire? Is this advanced technology? Ultrashort wave communications—radio communications—raises telephone technology to a new, higher level. Underground farming is being liquidated. No “lines”, no wires or cables. A whole army of people is freed up for more productive work. To get a telephone, you just need to go to the store, buy a ready-made transceiver and receive a wave from the telephone control, which will be yours subscriber number.”
In Dolgushin’s novel, a radiotelephone could be carried in a briefcase, but it, in essence, was the same mobile walkie-talkie: the disk served only for a fixed setting to a specific wavelength. The problem of calling a wired telephone number was not solved; in fact, the mobile phone was opposed to the wired one. It is not surprising that the radiotelephone in this form has not yet solved the communication problem.
Similar ideas did not leave inventors abroad. In the June issue of Modern Mechanics magazine for the same 1939, we can find a brief note that the South Caliphornia Telephone Company is close to practical creation a cordless phone that you can carry with you everywhere. Technical details were not disclosed in the note. In any case, we can assume that there was an intention to create such a phone.

The next step, already during the Great Patriotic War, was taken by the Soviet scientist and inventor Georgy Ilyich Babat in besieged Leningrad, proposing the so-called “monophone” - an automatic radiotelephone operating in the centimeter range 1000-2000 MHz (currently the GSM standard uses frequencies 850, 900 , 1800 and 1900 Hz), the number of which is encoded in the phone itself, is equipped with an alphabetic keyboard and also has the functions of a voice recorder and an answering machine. “It weighs no more than a Leika film machine,” wrote G. Babat in his article “Monophone” in the magazine “Technology-Youth” No. 7-8 for 1943: “Wherever the subscriber is - at home, away or at work, in the foyer of a theater, on the stands of a stadium, watching competitions - everywhere he can connect his individual monophone to one of the many ends of the wave network branches. Several subscribers can connect to one end, and no matter how many there are, they will not interfere with each other friend.” Due to the fact that the principles of cellular communications had not yet been invented at that time, Babat proposed using an extensive network of microwave waveguides to connect mobile phones with the base station.

Just a few years later, in 1945, a book by V.I. appears in the USSR. Nemtsov’s “Invisible Paths: Notes of a Radio Designer,” which describes the work of a radio designer using the example of creating a mobile phone.
“Talk from the forest, wirelessly, with any subscriber of the city network - after all, this is an almost fantastic phone in your pocket! True, the phone weighs about fifteen kilograms. But I tried not to think about it. This is an experimental model, a random design. Why spoil the joy of the first experiment!”
“Fantastic again,” the reader will say. And one could agree, if not for one “but”: the famous science fiction writer Vladimir Nemtsov at that time was a professional designer of radio communication equipment. He worked at the Research Institute of the Red Army, where he was involved in the creation of portable military radio stations, receiving more than 20 copyright certificates for inventions. He survived the war and the blockade in Leningrad, where he was engaged in mastering the production of radio stations, then was sent to Baku as chief engineer at a radio plant under construction. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star. And who else but him can realistically assess the possibility of creating a mobile phone!
Talking about the design of a mobile phone, V. Nemtsov first of all notes the difficulty of creating fairly simple and compact devices for connecting to the city telephone network, and describes in detail the procedure for checking the operation of a mobile phone both with a city network with manual switches and with a telephone exchange. Details are noted that would seem to be unnecessary neither for the popularization of scientific knowledge nor for a work of art; for example, it is mentioned that the girl at the switchboard, after a series of test calls, noted Nemtsov’s telephone number as not working; when trying to call from the car, it was not always possible to dial the number correctly, and the communication range was reduced to two kilometers. The question arises: wasn’t Nemtsov describing the real work on creating a mobile phone? And didn’t he make the first historical call back in 1945? It must be said that Nemtsov at that time had a completely objective reason for hiding such experiments: the resumption of amateur broadcasting in the USSR was allowed only in March 1946 (by the way, less than six months after it was allowed in the USA). However, it is now extremely difficult to verify this, and we may never know.
So, the mobile phone described in Nemtsov’s book weighed 15 kilograms, with the possibility of further reducing the weight and dimensions for pre-production samples. Let us remember that at that time there were not even finger lamps, only octal lamps, each of which was about the size of a bottle of office glue, and the weight of the batteries of that time was 70-80 percent of the weight of the product. The described telephone was a radio extender, to increase the communication range of which not only an antenna was used, but also a counterweight (grounding substitute), without which the communication range was reduced to two kilometers. To create a mobile communications network, Nemtsov proposed using millimeter waves in the future, with the base station antenna suspended on a balloon.
In any case, Nemtsov’s book pushed domestic radio amateurs and designers to attempt to create a mobile phone.

In December 1947, Douglas Ring and Ray Young, employees of the American company Bell, proposed the principle of hexagonal cells for mobile telephony. This happened right in the midst of intense efforts to create a phone that could be used to make calls from a car. The first such service was launched in 1946 in St. Louis by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1947 a system was launched with intermediate stations along the highway, allowing calls from a car on the way from New York to Boston. However, due to imperfections and high cost, these systems were not commercially successful. In 1948, another American telephone company in Richmond was able to establish car radio telephone service with automatic dialing rooms that were already better. The weight of the equipment of such systems was tens of kilograms and it was placed in the trunk, so the thought of a pocket version did not arise for an inexperienced person to look at it.

Nevertheless, as noted in the same 1946 in the journal “Science and Life”, No. 10, domestic engineers G. Shapiro and I. Zakharchenko developed a telephone communication system from a moving car with a city network, the mobile device of which had a power of only 1 watt and fit under the instrument panel. The food was from car battery.
To a radio installed on a landline telephone exchange, the phone number assigned to the vehicle was connected. To call a city subscriber, you had to turn on the device in the car, which sent your call signs on the air. They were perceived by the base station on the city PBX and the telephone set immediately turned on, working like a regular telephone. When calling a car, the city subscriber dialed the number, this activated the base station, the signal of which was received by the device on the car.

It was expected that the telephone system of Shapiro and Zakharchenko would be widely used in the work of fire brigades, air defense units, police, emergency medical and technical assistance. However, there was no further information about the development of the system. It can be assumed that it was considered more expedient for emergency rescue services to use their own departmental communication systems rather than use the GTS.

In the United States, the inventor Alfred Gross was the first to try to do the impossible. Since 1939, he was passionate about creating portable walkie-talkies, which decades later were called “walkie-talkies.” In 1949, he created a device based on a portable walkie-talkie, which he called a “wireless remote telephone.” The device could be carried with you, and it gave the owner a signal to answer the phone. It is believed that this was the first simple pager. Gross even implemented it in one of the hospitals in New York, but telephone companies showed no interest in this new product, or in his other ideas in this direction. So America lost the chance to become the birthplace of the first practically working mobile phone.

Pocket walkie-talkie Kupriyanovich 1955

However, these ideas were developed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USSR. So, one of those who continued the search in the field of mobile communications in our country was Leonid Kupriyanovich. The press of that time reported very little about his personality. It was known that he lived in Moscow, his activities were sparingly characterized by the press as a “radio engineer” or “radio amateur.” It is also known that Kupriyanovich could be considered at that time successful person– in the early 60s he had a car.

The consonance of the surnames of Kupriyanovich and Cooper is only the initial link in a chain of strange coincidences in the fate of these individuals. Kupriyanovich, like Cooper and Gross, also started with miniature walkie-talkies - he has been making them since the mid-50s, and many of his designs are striking even now - both in their dimensions and in the simplicity and originality of their solutions. The tube radio he created in 1955 weighed the same as the first transistor walkie-talkies of the early 60s.

1957 – walkie-talkie from a matchbox

In 1957, Kupriyanovich demonstrates an even more amazing thing - a walkie-talkie the size of a matchbox and weighing only 50 grams (including power supplies), which can work without changing the power supply for 50 hours and provides communication at a range of two kilometers - quite comparable to products of the 21st century, which can be seen on the windows of current communication stores (photo from the magazine YUT, 3, 1957). As evidenced by the publication in YuT, 12, 1957, this radio station used mercury or manganese batteries.

At the same time, Kupriyanovich not only did without microcircuits, which simply did not exist at that time, but also used miniature lamps together with transistors. In 1957 and 1960, the first and second editions of his book for radio amateurs were published, with the promising title “Pocket Radios”.

Kupriyanovich's wrist radio

The 1960 publication describes a simple radio with just three transistors that can be worn on the wrist - much like the famous watch-talkie from the film “Off Season”. The author offered it for repetition by tourists and mushroom pickers, but in real life it was mainly students who showed interest in this design by Kupriyanovich - for tips on exams, which was even included in an episode of Gaidaev’s film comedy “Operation Y.”

And, just like Cooper, pocket walkie-talkies inspired Kupriyanovich to make a radiotelephone from which he could call any city telephone, and which he could take with him anywhere. The pessimistic sentiments of foreign companies could not stop a man who knew how to make walkie-talkies from matchboxes.

3. THE IMPOSSIBLE BECAME POSSIBLE.

In 1957 L.I. Kupriyanovich received an author's certificate for “Radiophone” - an automatic radiotelephone with direct dialing. Through an automatic telephone radio station from this device it was possible to connect with any subscriber of the telephone network within the range of the Radiofon transmitter. By that time, the first operating set of equipment was ready, demonstrating the principle of operation of the “Radiophone”, called LK-1 by the inventor (Leonid Kupriyanovich, first sample).
By our standards, the LK-1 was still difficult to call a mobile phone, but it made a great impression on its contemporaries. “The telephone device is small in size, its weight does not exceed three kilograms,” wrote Science and Life. “The batteries are located inside the device; their continuous use period is 20-30 hours. LK-1 has 4 special radio tubes, so that the power delivered by the antenna is sufficient for short-wave communication over distances of 20-30 kilometers. The device has 2 antennas; on its front panel there are 4 call switches, a microphone (outside of which headphones are connected) and a dial for dialing.”

Just like in a modern cell phone, Kupriyanovich’s device was connected to the city telephone network through a base station (the author called it ATR - automatic telephone radio station), which received signals from mobile phones in wired network and transmitted from the wired network to mobile phones. 50 years ago, the principles of operation of a mobile phone were described for inexperienced cleaners simply and figuratively: “The ATP connection with any subscriber occurs like a regular telephone, only we control its operation from a distance.”
To operate the mobile phone with the base station, four communication channels were used at four frequencies: two channels were used for transmitting and receiving sound, one for dialing and one for hanging up.

The reader may suspect that the LK-1 was a simple radio tube for a telephone. But it turns out that this is not so.

“The question inevitably arises: won’t several simultaneously operating LK-1s interfere with each other?” – writes the same “Science and Life”. “No, because in this case the device uses different tonal frequencies, causing its relays to operate on the ATP (the tonal frequencies will be transmitted on the same wavelength). The frequencies of sound transmission and reception will be different for each device in order to avoid their mutual influence.”

Nevertheless, the practical possibility of implementing a wearable mobile phone and organizing such a mobile communication service, at least in the form of departmental switches, has been proven. “The range of the device... is several tens of kilometers,” writes Leonid Kupriyanovich in a note for the July 1957 issue of the magazine “Young Technician”. “If within these limits there is only one receiving device, this will be enough to talk with any city resident who has a telephone, and for any number of kilometers.” “Radiotelephones...can be used on vehicles, airplanes and ships. Passengers will be able to call home, work, or book a hotel room directly from the plane. It will find use among tourists, builders, hunters, etc.”

In addition, Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would be able to displace phones built into cars. At the same time, the young inventor immediately used something like a headset “ hands free”, i.e. used instead of an earphone Speakerphone. In an interview with M. Melgunova, published in the magazine “Za Rulem”, 12, 1957, Kupriyanovich intended to introduce mobile phones in two stages. “At first, while there are few radio telephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near home phone car enthusiast. But later, when there are thousands of such devices, ATP will no longer work for one radiotelephone, but for hundreds and thousands. Moreover, all of them will not interfere with each other, since each of them will have its own tonal frequency, causing its own relay to work.” Thus, Kupriyanovich essentially positioned two types at once household appliances– simple radio handsets, which were easier to put into production, and mobile phone service, in which one base station serves thousands of subscribers.

One can be surprised how accurately Kupriyanovich imagined more than half a century ago how widely the mobile phone would become part of our everyday life.
“By taking such a radiophone with you, you are essentially taking an ordinary telephone set, but without wires,” he would write a couple of years later. “No matter where you are, you can always be found by phone; you just have to dial the known number of your radiophone from any landline phone (even a pay phone). The phone rings in your pocket and you start a conversation. If necessary, you can dial any city telephone number directly from a tram, trolleybus, or bus, call an ambulance, fire truck or emergency vehicle, or contact your home...”
It's hard to believe that these words were written by a person who has not visited the 21st century. However, for Kupriyanovich there was no need to travel to the future. He built it.

In 1958, Kupryanovich, at the request of radio amateurs, published in the February issue of the magazine “Young Technician” a simplified design of the device, the ATR of which can only work with one radio tube and does not have the function of long-distance calls.

LK-1 and base station. YuT, 2, 1958.

Using such a mobile phone was somewhat more difficult than modern ones. Before calling a subscriber, it was necessary, in addition to the receiver, to also turn on the transmitter on the handset. Hearing a long sound in the earphone telephone beep and having made the appropriate switches, you could proceed to dialing the number. But it was still more convenient than on radio stations of that time, since there was no need to switch from receiving to transmitting and ending each phrase with the word “Reception!” At the end of the conversation, the load transmitter turned itself off to save batteries.

Publishing a description in a magazine for youth, Kupriyanovich was not afraid of competition. By this time, he had already prepared a new model of the device, which at that time could be considered revolutionary.

4. ...BUT IT’S CONVENIENT, CHEAP AND PRACTICAL.

The 1958 model of a mobile phone, including its power source, weighed only 500 grams.

According to L.I. Kupriyanovich in his article published in the February issue of the journal “Technology for Youth” for 1959, it was now possible to place up to a thousand communication channels of radiophones with the Asia-Pacific region on one wavelength. To do this, the encoding of the number in the radiophone was done in a pulsed manner, and during a conversation the signal was compressed using a device that the author of the radiophone called a correlator. According to the description in the same article, the work of the correlator was based on the principle of a vocoder - dividing the speech signal into several frequency ranges, compressing each range and subsequent restoration at the receiving site. True, voice recognition should have deteriorated, but given the quality of wired communications at that time, this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing an ATP on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees fifteen years later installed a base station on top of a 50-story building in New York). And judging by the phrase “pocket radiophones made by the author of this article,” we can conclude that in 1959 Kupriyanovich manufactured at least two experimental mobile phones.

“So far there are only prototypes of the new device, but there is no doubt that it will soon become widespread in transport, in the city telephone network, in industry, on construction sites, etc.” Kupriyanovich writes in the journal “Science and Life” in August 1957. But the biggest sensation lay ahead.

5. PDA FOR GAGARIN’S FLIGHT.

In 1961 L.I. Kupriyanovich shows APN correspondents Yuri Rybchinsky and Yu. Shcherbakov... a pocket mobile phone.

Seeing this device, a modern reader will probably exclaim, “It can’t be!” In fact, to create a phone in 1961 with the size of a 21st century handheld is absolutely incredible. However, APN, the Novosti Press Agency, created in the same 1961 on the basis of the former Sovinformburo, is a very respectable organization, whose tasks are to convey information about the USSR to foreign media. There can’t be any unverified facts that threaten revelations and scandals here.
I believe that the reader has already come to his senses after seeing the Soviet handheld, and can calmly perceive the other data of the device. Kupriyanovich brought the weight of a mobile phone to just 70 grams. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, not all mobile phones can boast of this. True, the functions of the 1961 handheld are minimal, there is no display and the dialer is small - you’ll probably have to turn it with a pencil. But there is no better place anywhere in the world yet, and there won’t be for a long time. According to Rybchinsky’s description, this Kupriyanovich device had two transmitters and one receiver, was assembled on semiconductors and was powered by nickel-cadmium batteries, which were used in mobile phones at the beginning of the new century.

And then there was silence. On this moment- this is the last of the publications known to the author of the page about Kupriyanovich’s radiophone, plans for its production and infrastructure construction. It is also strange that the publication of correspondents of an international news agency surfaced only in the regional newspaper “Orlovskaya Pravda” (12, 1961). There is not a word in the central publications about the sensational handheld. Not to mention foreign ones.
At the same time, the same publications continue to publish other articles by the inventor. In the February issue of “UT” for 1960, Kupriyanovich publishes a description of the radio station with automatic call and a range of 40-50 km, in the January issue of “Technology for Youth” for 1961 - a popular article about microelectronics technologies “Radio receiver under a microscope”. In the November issue of “TM” there is another article: “Europe is looking at Red Square.” All this, of course, is necessary and relevant, but how? world achievement our conscience of science?

All this is so strange and unusual that it involuntarily suggests the thought: was there really a working radiophone?

6. “I AM TORROUNDED BY VARIABLE DOUBT.”

Did Kupriyanovich himself have any motives to create and show journalists over the course of an entire five-year period as many as three different non-working devices - for example, in order to achieve success or recognition? In publications of the 50s, the inventor’s place of work is not indicated; the media present him to readers as a “radio amateur” or “engineer.” However, it is known that Leonid Ivanovich lived and worked in Moscow, he was awarded the academic degree of Candidate of Technical Sciences, he subsequently worked at the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and in the early 60s had a car (for which, by the way, he himself created a radiotelephone and an anti-theft radio alarm) . In other words, by Soviet standards he was very successful. Two of Kupriyanovich's inventions were patented in the USA in the 70s. Doubters can also check a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including the LK-1 adapted for young technicians.
Let's look at the question from the other side. Maybe at that time in the USA there were many similar amateur designs? Let's open the February 1958 issue of Modern Mechanics with an article by John Robinson Pierce, director of telecommunications research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, entitled "Telephones tomorrow" Who else but him should know about this.
“Does this (the appearance of pocket pagers - O.I.) convince us of the possibility of a telephone in every car, or maybe even in every pocket?” - writes Mr. Pierce. “Technically, this will soon be possible. We can create a miniature transistor receiver that can operate 24 hours a day without significantly draining the car battery. Together with a suitable transmitter, the car phone can be placed in the glove compartment or combined with the radio. And in the future, pocket phones will no longer be absurd.”
If we assume that the head of the research departments of the Bell company speaks absolutely sincerely, then it turns out that in 1958 he had not heard anything about such telephones in the United States. He just thinks the idea is not crazy. Of course in the future.
Don't think that Americans never dreamed of such a phone. In September 1956, the same magazine published a fascinating article, “Your Phone of Tomorrow.” About how one night in the future, on Market Street in San Francisco, a young man calls his friend in Rome on his cell phone. With video. With 3-D video. In the America of the future, every baby will be given a telephone number from birth. If a person cannot be reached, it means he has died. Here is such an optimistic forecast.

The radiophone played, perhaps, only one important role in Kupriyanovich’s life - it determined the choice of his life path. “Leonid Kupriyanovich worked on his invention for several years, first as an amateur, and then radio engineering became his profession.” – wrote Yuri Rybchinsky.

Doubters can also check a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including the LK-1 adapted for young technicians. This is what they did, for example, in 1959 at the Arkhangelsk Electrical Technical College of Communications, second-year student Nikolai Sulakov, Vyacheslav Krotov and others under the guidance of the technical school teacher Konstantin Petrovich Gashchenko. Having read in the magazine “Young Technician” about Kupriyanovich’s inventions, they created their own simplified version of a radiotelephone (radio tube), operating in the 38 MHz range. True, the details were more complicated (for example, a thermal relay had to be installed in the release circuit). Subsequently, a portable device was created, which Sulakov turned out to weigh 2 kilograms with batteries; the tuning stability and range were inferior to Kupriyanovich’s device, but for the student’s design it was not so bad. Sulakov used the army radio station 12-RP as a base station. Further work on the mobile phone was stopped for a completely prosaic reason - the creator was puzzled by the question “Why do I need such a phone?” However, thanks to this work, Nikolai Sulakov received a prize for participating in an exhibition of communications technical schools in Odessa and was able to transfer to the radio department.

So, there is no doubt that the radiophone existed, it worked, there were some kind of decisions about its production, as well as the deployment of a system of base stations in Moscow. Then why didn’t all this come into our lives back then?

7. AND THE WAY IS FAR AND LONG...

During perestroika, readers became accustomed to sad stories about geniuses in the USSR, whose inventions were mercilessly buried by the bureaucracy (in comparison with their colleagues who flourished under conditions of private initiative in the West). And it would be very tempting to say - well, the Soviet people had the opportunity even under Khrushchev to step into the mobile era, but due to prohibitions on having a walkie-talkie for private use, this opportunity was lost. And such an explanation would be simple and understandable.

Only in real life the development of events does not fit into this simple scheme.

First of all, bureaucratic obstacles to cellular communications existed in both the USSR and the USA. It took the FCC 21 years to officially authorize widespread use of cell phones by civilians. On the other hand, in the USSR the issues of using radio communications by civilians were resolved quite quickly, if it was not about personal matters, but about official use. In the 60s, the national automobile communication service “Altai” was launched in the USSR, which was quite good for that time. Then maybe bureaucratic thoughtlessness is to blame? They say that officials did not appreciate the merits of cellular communications and did not give it a go. Moreover, one of the authoritative experts said: “Cell phones have no future, while communications in cars are already used today”... Stop. But these words were spoken not in 1959, but in 1973, not in the USSR, but in the USA, and this was stated by the private Bell company. Moreover, based on motives familiar from Soviet production films, the company promoted a car communication device weighing 14 kilograms. The further development of cellular communications in the United States also resembled a plot from a Soviet movie. After Cooper's historic call Cell Phones were not yet approved by the FCC and could not hit the shelves. Because of this, Americans wishing to acquire an expensive new product were forced to sign up in queues 5-10 years in advance. It was possible to correct the situation only in 1983, and in a purely Soviet way - “through pull.” Motorola founder Paul Galvin, using his personal connections and acquaintance with US Vice President George Bush, was able to get him a meeting with Ronald Reagan. The main argument in the conversation was purely political - Japan could catch up and overtake America in cellular communications. The fate of the development was literally decided by a call from above.

“Altai” from the very beginning had specific customers on whom the allocation of funds depended. In addition, the main problem in implementing both projects was not at all in creating a portable device, but in the need for significant investments and time in creating a communication infrastructure and its debugging and the costs of its maintenance. During the deployment of Altai, for example, in Kyiv, the transmitter output lamps failed, and in Tashkent, problems arose due to poor-quality installation of base station equipment. As Radio magazine wrote, in 1968 the Altai system was deployed only in Moscow and Kyiv, followed by Samarkand, Tashkent, Donetsk and Odessa.
Mobile communications in the early 60s in any country would have been a fairly expensive service that only a small part of the population could afford. The potential customer - a large Western businessman or a Soviet leader - did not have any need to carry a phone in his pocket at that time. At work or at home they were provided wired connection, and in the open air they always had a car with a driver at their service, where they could not think about the dimensions and weight of the equipment. From this point of view, “Altai” corresponded well to the demand of that time. Eight transmitters served up to 500-800 subscribers, and the transmission quality was comparable only to digital communications. The implementation of this project looked more realistic than the deployment of a national cellular network based on Radiofon.

However, the idea of a mobile phone, despite its apparent untimeliness, was not buried at all. There were also industrial samples of the device!

8. UNDER THE BALKAN STARS.

In the early 60s, the echo of publications about Kupriyanovich’s radiophone had not yet subsided. So, in the book by K.K. Boboshko “Interesting to know” mentions the 1958 model. In 1964, this invention was also written about in Bulgaria, in the third issue of the teenage popular science magazine “Cosmos”. At the same time, a device was described in a plastic case of smaller dimensions than it was in the 1958 photograph - 110 * 80 * 30 mm, although heavier - 700 grams, made entirely of transistors. Instead of a handset (according to the text description), the device used a piezo-crystal speaker, which also served as a loudspeaker; Nickel-cadmium batteries were used for power supply; the range of the device was 80 km.

It was also reported that the radiophone would be widely used in industry, agriculture and rescue services, and Kupriyanovich himself is working on an improved model, the range of which will be 200 kilometers!

Of course, you never know what will be written in a children's magazine? However, it was not only children who had the desire to become pioneers of mobile communications in Bulgaria. In 1959, engineer Hristo Bachvarov (Bachvarov) took out a patent in the field of mobile radiotelephony, and in the 60s he created a mobile phone, conceptually similar to Kupriyanovich's radiophone.

As the Bulgarian magazine “E-vestik.bg” wrote, Bachvarov created two experimental samples of mobile phones, for which he received the Dimitrov Prize. In an interview with journalist Zornitsa Veselinova, Bachvarov reported that the mobile phone was exhibited by him in the USSR at an exhibition in Moscow, was shown to cosmonauts A. Leonov, N. Rukavishnikov and P. Belyaev, “but for mass production it required American and Japanese transistors,” the use of which, according to Bachvarov, it was not agreed upon. According to unverified data, Bachvarov's experimental sample had two communication channels, operated in the frequency range 60-70 MHz and was used as a demonstrator; the second sample of the device was handed over to the head of state T. Zhivkov for promotional purposes. That is, Bachvarov’s prototype consisted of two long-range radio tubes. Publications sometimes state that Bachvarov allegedly invented “the essence of today’s jiesem” in 1959, which is incorrect, because The GSM standard specification has been in development since 1982 and was published in 1992.

Subsequently, the first industrial designs of mobile phones were created in Bulgaria. Already at the Inforga-65 exhibition, the Bulgarian company Radioelectronics demonstrated a mobile phone that could work with a base station for 15 subscribers. This phone was positioned as a competitor to the pager system known abroad. “Bulgarian designers took a different path,” wrote engineers Yu. Popov and Yu. Pukhnachev in their article “Inforga-65,” published in the magazine “Science and Life” number 8 for 1965. “To implement wireless communication, they used a system developed several years ago by the Soviet inventor, engineer L. Kupriyanovich. A special set-top box is connected to the city telephone network, serving 15 radiotelephones. During a conversation, its antenna picks up information coming from radiotelephones and sends it to telephone network. Transistor radiotelephones provide reliable two-way radio communications.”
So, the magazine “Science and Life” named Kupriyanovich, but not Bachvarov, the father of Bulgarian mobile communications. At a minimum, this means that during the development of the device, the groundwork created by L.I. was officially used. Kupriyanovich. The Radioelectronics device was larger in size than Kupriyanovich’s device, demonstrated in 1961; This is not at all surprising, because restrictions on the transfer of technology abroad, including to Eastern European countries, could have played a role here.

A year later, among the exhibits of the Bulgarian exposition at the Interorgtekhnika-66 exhibition were the so-called “automatic radiotelephones” PAT-0.5 and ATRT-0.5, which allow “to carry out radio communication on the VHF range with any telephone subscriber of the city, region and enterprise without a special device for his telephone set.” As you can see in the picture, this mobile phone already resembled a modern one (except, of course, for the dialer), fit easily in the hand and generally fit the description of 1964. The devices were assembled using transistors and could be included in any automatic telephone exchange using the RATC-10 base station.

Six mobile phones could initially operate simultaneously through one base station. This is, of course, less than Motorola's first base station, which had 30 subscribers, but in 1966, Motorola was still developing the first walkie-talkies. The limitation of the number of subscribers to six was due to the number distribution system: numbers began with one emergency services, from zero - city, from nine - internal departmental, and one number had to be assigned to the base station operator; thus, without installing an additional switch, there were six numbers left for subscribers. Subsequently, systems for 69 and 699 numbers were created.
The channel selection system on “bricks”, as mobile phones were colloquially called in Bulgaria at that time, was simplified and had a number of disadvantages for the user. The channel could be selected either manually using two switches, or the selection was automatic under the influence of a frequency-modulated signal in the channel. The base station continuously transmitted a tone code of several tones in each channel. The mobile phone had several narrow-band filters for detecting tones after the demodulator, DIP switches for selecting “your” tones, and comparators for 8 or 12 bits from the 74 series. If the channel had “its own” tone code, then the mobile phone received and transmitted in this channel. If “its own” tone code was not found, the mobile phone switched transmission to the “general/service” channel, and the receiving channel began searching for its code sequentially across all channels. Channel channels were switched until the code appeared at the demodulator output.

The speech signal had amplitude modulation, and therefore the selection signal was perceived as significant background noise. Sometimes external noise entering the channel through the microphone led to spontaneous channel switching. Later they began to use timers that limited the noise to short “pings” every 4-6 seconds so that the mobile phone did not lose the channel.

Nevertheless, for the 60s, this system was quite acceptable and became widespread in Bulgaria as a departmental communication system for industrial enterprises - open pit mines, electrical networks, chemical plants, especially since this system provided for a conference call mode. The devices of the RATC series were produced and improved until the 80s inclusive. At the Sofia-Vostok TPP, the equipment was dismantled and replaced with more modern ones in the nineties. Thus, Bulgaria became a country with developed mobile communications using wearable phones much earlier than the United States.
By the mid-seventies, a set of equipment had already been created and tested to create a national mobile communications system (“national system for radio communication”). Unfortunately, after the death in 1977, Prof. Bradistilov's work was delayed for 10 years.

9. WHAT ABOUT THE WEST?

Western European countries also attempted to create mobile communications before Cooper's historic call. Less than a year after Bulgaria demonstrated its mobile phones in Moscow, the so-called Carry Phone was presented in the November issue of Science & Mechanics magazine, as the new kind service. True, in terms of size and weight, the new Western technology was clearly inferior to the new Eastern technology. And for convenience too.

The mobile phone was created by the American company Carry Phone Co. from Studio City, California and was offered for sale at $3,000 or for lease at $50 per call. The ad didn't mention range, but said it could be taken on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago.

The Carry Phone was a briefcase-diplomat with a telephone receiver inside, weighing 4.5 kg. When there was an incoming call, short rings were heard inside the suitcase, and to answer it you had to open the suitcase. In order to make an outgoing call, you had to select one of 11 free channels using buttons. After the operator answered, you had to dial the number and name the number to be connected to, after which the operator (attention!) called the telephone company and connected the owner of the mobile phone to the telephone network. Thus, in terms of function, it was a definite step back compared even to Kupriyanovich’s 1957 device. However, this solution eliminated the problem of the need to create an expensive mobile communications infrastructure, since it made it possible to use existing car radiotelephone networks.

In a market economy, when the demand for such a service was still unclear, government policy regarding such infrastructure was not defined, and investments in this market segment went specifically to the development of a car radiotelephone, this approach could be considered reasonable. Subsequently, in the USA, similar devices called “attache’ phones” (portfolio phones) developed as a segment of the car communications market. In particular, they were produced by American companies Livermore, General Communication Systems, and Integrated Systems Technology. “Whether on business or on vacation, your portable phone is always at hand,” the advertisement said. By the way, at that time a mobile phone in the USA was a telephone installed in a car, as in the Soviet Altai system. Most of these phones released in the USA at that time worked with the MTS network, some models had modifications for IMTS/MTS networks. This model mobile telephony service lasted in the United States until the early 80s, until it began to experience competition from cellular networks new generation.

April 11, 1972, i.e. one year before Cooper's call, the British company Pye Telecommunications demonstrated at the “Communications Today, Tomorrow and the Future” exhibition at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, a portable mobile phone that could be used to call the city telephone network.

The mobile phone consisted of a Pocketphone 70 radio, used by the police, and a set-top box - a handset with a push-button dial that could be held in your hands. The phone operated in the range of 450-470 MHz, judging by the Pocketphone 70 radio, it could have up to 12 channels and was powered by a 15 V source.

There is also information about the existence in France in the 60s of a mobile phone with semi-automatic switching of subscribers. The digits of the dialed number were displayed on dekatrons at the base station, after which the telephone operator manually performed the switching. At the moment, there is no exact data on why such a strange dialing system was adopted; one can only assume that a possible reason was errors in transmitting the number, which were corrected by the telephone operator.

10. THERE, AROUND THE TURN.

Other mobile pioneers have also switched gears.

By the end of the war, Georgy Babat focused on his other idea - transport powered by microwave radiation, made more than a hundred inventions, became a Doctor of Science, was awarded the Stalin Prize, and also became famous as the author of science fiction works.

Alfred Gross continued to work as a microwave and communications specialist for Sperry and General Electric. He continued to create until his death at the age of 82.

In 1967, Hristo Bachvarov took up the radio synchronization system for city clocks, for which he received two gold medals at the Leipzig Fair, headed the Institute of Radioelectronics, and was awarded by the country's leadership for other developments. Later he switched to high-frequency ignition systems in automobile engines.

Martin Cooper headed a small private company, ArrayComm, which is promoting its own technology for fast wireless internet. On the fortieth anniversary of the demonstration of his model, he was awarded the Marconi Prize.

11. INSTEAD OF AN EPILOGUE.

30 years after the creation of LK-1, on April 9, 1987, at the KALASTAJATORPPA hotel in Helsinki (Finland), General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee M.S. Gorbachev made a mobile call to the USSR Ministry of Communications in the presence of Nokia Vice President Stefan Widomski.
Thus, the mobile phone has become a means of influencing the minds of politicians - just like the first satellite during the time of Khrushchev. Although, unlike a satellite, a working mobile phone was not actually an indicator of technical superiority - the same Khrushchev was able to call using it...
“Wait!” - the reader will object. “So who should be considered the creator of the first mobile phone - Cooper, Kupriyanovich, Bachvarov?”
It seems that there is no point in contrasting the results of the work here. Economic opportunities for mass use of the new service emerged only in 1990.

It is possible that there were other attempts to create a wearable mobile phone that were ahead of their time, and humanity will someday remember them.

Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich(July 14, 1929 - 1994) - Soviet radio engineer and popularizer of radio engineering. In 1957, he created the world's first prototype of a portable automatic duplex portable radiotelephone LK-1 - the predecessor of cellular communications.

Biography

In 1953 he graduated from Moscow Higher Technical School. N. E. Bauman, majoring in Radioelectronics, Faculty of Instrument Engineering. The family was not informed of the exact place of work until the mid-60s. On November 4, 1957, he received patent No. 115494 for “Device for calling and switching radiotelephone communication channels,” which outlined the fundamental principles of mobile telephony, compression and decompression of signals, and a schematic diagram of a mobile telephone device. Also, the principles and electrical circuit were set out in the July 1957 and February 1958 issues of the Young Technician magazine; in subsequent issues Kupriyanovich gave explanations and answers to readers’ questions. Articles about the device were also published in the journal Science and Life; the automotive use case was described in the magazine “Behind the Wheel”; The invention was reported by TASS and APN. In 1957, Kupriyanovich publicly showed a working prototype of the automatic mobile phone LK-1, weighing 3 kg, that he had made; a year later there was a prototype weighing only 500 grams, and in 1961 the device, which Kupriyanovich called a radiophone, weighed only 70 grams. The radiophone communicated with the city telephone exchange through a base station (automatic telephone radio station, ATR). The author argued: “to serve a city like Moscow with radio communications, only ten automatic telephone radio stations will be needed. The first of these stations is designed in the new metropolitan area - Mazilovo.” For personal use (or as the first stage of implementation), a radio extender mode for an existing subscriber line was proposed with the connection of a personal ATP to the subscriber line.

In 1965, at the Inforga-65 exhibition, the Bulgarian company Radioelectronics presented a mobile phone with a base station for 15 subscribers. According to press reports, the developers “applied a system developed several years ago by the Soviet inventor, engineer L. Kupriyanovich.” The following year, Bulgaria presented at the Interorgtekhnika-66 exhibition a mobile communication set consisting of RAT-0.5 and ATRT-0.5 mobile phones with a RATC-10 base station. This system was produced in Bulgaria for departmental communications at industrial and construction sites and was in operation until the 90s.

Since the second half of the 60s, L. I. Kupriyanovich changed his place of work and was engaged in the creation of medical equipment. He creates the Rhythmoson device, which controls a person’s sleep and wakefulness patterns, publishes scientific works on improving memory and hypnopedia. According to Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences N.F. Izmerov in the film “The Mystery of LK-1”, L.I. Kupriyanovich successfully worked on this topic before retiring, defended his dissertation, was periodically hired to carry out work on closed topics, carried out with the help of his apparatus recovery of major state leaders.

Bibliography

Bornovolokov E. P., Kupriyanovich L. I. Portable VHF radio stations. - M.: DOSAAF Publishing House, 1958.
Kupriyanovich L.I. Radio electronics in everyday life. - M.-L.: Gosenergoizdat, 1963. - 32 p.
Kupriyanovich L.I. Pocket radio stations. - M.: Gosenergoizdat, 1960.
Kupriyanovich L.I. Memory improvement reserves. Cybernetic aspects. - M. Nauka, 1970. - 142 p.
Kupriyanovich L.I. Biological rhythms and sleep. - M.: Nauka, 1976. - 120 p.

What is written here is not science fiction, not a hoax, or alternative history. We will talk about events that actually took place, but due to various, not fully clarified circumstances, they turned out to be completely forgotten.
Oleg Izmerov.

DOMESTIC MOBILES OF THE 50'S
ordinary space age sensation

Usually the history of the creation of a mobile phone is told something like this.

Prior to this, the son of the founder of Motorola, Robert Gelvin, who at that time held the post of executive director of this company, allocated $15 million and gave his subordinates a period of 10 years to create a device that the user could carry with him. The first working sample appeared just a couple of months later. The success of Martin Cooper, who joined the company in 1954 as an ordinary engineer, was facilitated by the fact that since 1967 he had been developing portable walkie-talkies. They led to the idea of the mobile phone.

It is believed that until this moment there were no other mobile telephones that a person could carry with him, like a watch or a notebook. There were walkie-talkies, there were “mobile” phones that could be used in a car or train, but there was no such thing for just walking down the street.

The man in the photo from the magazine "Science and Life" was named Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich (emphasis on the "o"), and it was he who turned out to be the person who made the call on a mobile phone 15 years before Cooper. But before we talk about this, let us remember that the basic principles of mobile communications have a very, very long history.

Portable VHF transmitter. "Radiofront", 16, 1936

Actually, attempts to make the phone mobile appeared soon after its inception. Field telephones with coils were created to quickly lay a line, and attempts were made to quickly provide communication from a car by throwing wires onto a line running along the highway or connecting to a socket on a pole. Of all this, only field phones have found relatively wide distribution (at one of the mosaics of the Kyiv metro station in Moscow, modern passengers sometimes mistake a field phone for a mobile phone and laptop).
It was not very convenient to look for an outlet, so the idea of a wireless mobile phone appeared somewhere at the very beginning of the 20th century. Thus, the American newspaper Salt Lake Telegram, citing the Associated Press agency, on March 3, 1919, reports that Godfrey C. Isaacs, managing director of the Marconi company, said that the experiments carried out allow one to believe in the idea of wireless pocket phone as an everyday thing. “Thus, a person walking along the street may hear a telephone ringing in his pocket, and, putting the receiver to his ear, will hear the voice of another, one who may be flying on an airplane at a speed of hundreds of kilometers per hour from Warsaw to London.”
However, it became possible to ensure true mobility of telephone communications only after the advent of radio communications in the VHF range. By the 1930s, transmitters had appeared that a person could easily carry on his back or hold in his hands - in particular, they were used by the American radio company NBC for operational reporting from the scene. Such means of communication have not yet provided connections with automatic telephone exchanges.

However, the Soviet science fiction “Closer Sight” had already informed people about the possibility of replacing telephones with such radio installations. In the chapters of the novel “Generator of Miracles” published in the first issue of the magazine “Technology for Youth” in 1939, the writer Yuri Dolgushin, through the mouth of his hero, engineer Tungusov, proclaimed:
"- The modern telephone is already archaic. The telephone network is growing literally every day. Can you imagine how cumbersome our underground infrastructure will soon become if we continue to connect each device to the district station with a special wire? Is this advanced technology? Communication on ultrashort waves - radio communication - raises telephone technology to a new, higher level. Underground farming is being eliminated. No “lines”, no wires and cables. A whole army of people is freed up for more productive work. To get a telephone, you just need to go to the store, buy a ready-made transceiver and receive a wave from the telephone control, which will be your subscriber number."
In Dolgushin’s novel, a radiotelephone could be carried in a briefcase, but it, in essence, was the same mobile walkie-talkie: the disk served only for a fixed setting to a specific wavelength. The problem of calling a wired telephone number was not solved; in fact, the mobile phone was opposed to the wired one. It is not surprising that the radiotelephone in this form has not yet solved the communication problem.
Similar ideas did not leave inventors abroad. In the June issue of Modern Mechanics magazine for the same 1939, we can find a brief note that the South Caliphornia Telephone Company is close to the practical creation of a cordless telephone that can be carried everywhere with you. Technical details were not disclosed in the note. In any case, we can assume that there was an intention to create such a phone.
The next step, already during the Great Patriotic War, was taken by the Soviet scientist and inventor Georgy Ilyich Babat in besieged Leningrad, proposing the so-called “monophone” - an automatic radiotelephone operating in the centimeter range 1000-2000 MHz (currently the GSM standard uses frequencies 850, 900 , 1800 and 1900 Hz), the number of which is encoded in the phone itself, is equipped with an alphabetic keyboard and also has the functions of a voice recorder and an answering machine. “It weighs no more than a Leika film machine,” wrote G. Babat in his article “Monophone” in the magazine “Technology-Youth” No. 7-8 for 1943: “Wherever the subscriber is - at home, away or at work, in the foyer of a theater, on the stands of a stadium, watching competitions - everywhere he can connect his individual monophone to one of the many ends of the branching wave network. Several subscribers can connect to one end, and no matter how many there are, they will not interfere with each other friend." Due to the fact that the principles of cellular communications had not yet been invented at that time, Babat proposed using an extensive network of microwave waveguides to connect mobile phones with the base station.

Just a few years later, in 1945, a book by V.I. appears in the USSR. Nemtsov's "Invisible Paths: Notes of a Radio Designer", which describes the work of a radio designer using the example of creating a mobile phone.
“Talking from the forest, without wires, with any subscriber of the city network - after all, this is an almost fantastic phone in your pocket! True, the phone weighs fifteen kilograms. But I tried not to think about it. This is an experimental model, a random design. Why darken the joy of the first experiment!"
“Fantastic again,” the reader will say. And one could agree, if not for one “but”: the famous science fiction writer Vladimir Nemtsov at that time was a professional designer of radio communication equipment. He worked at the Research Institute of the Red Army, where he was involved in the creation of portable military radio stations, receiving more than 20 copyright certificates for inventions. He survived the war and the blockade in Leningrad, where he was engaged in mastering the production of radio stations, then was sent to Baku as chief engineer at a radio plant under construction. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star. And who else but him can realistically assess the possibility of creating a mobile phone!
Talking about the design of a mobile phone, V. Nemtsov first of all notes the difficulty of creating fairly simple and compact devices for connecting to the city telephone network, and describes in detail the procedure for checking the operation of a mobile phone both with a city network with manual switches and with a telephone exchange. Details are noted that would seem to be unnecessary neither for the popularization of scientific knowledge nor for a work of art; for example, it is mentioned that the girl at the switchboard, after a series of test calls, noted Nemtsov’s telephone number as not working; when trying to call from the car, it was not always possible to dial the number correctly, and the communication range was reduced to two kilometers. The question arises: wasn’t Nemtsov describing the real work on creating a mobile phone? And didn’t he make the first historical call back in 1945? It must be said that Nemtsov at that time had a completely objective reason for hiding such experiments: the resumption of amateur broadcasting in the USSR was allowed only in March 1946 (by the way, less than six months after it was allowed in the USA). However, it is now extremely difficult to verify this, and we may never know.
So, the mobile phone described in Nemtsov’s book weighed 15 kilograms, with the possibility of further reducing the weight and dimensions for pre-production samples. Let us remember that at that time there were not even finger lamps, only octal lamps, each of which was about the size of a bottle of office glue, and the weight of the batteries of that time was 70-80 percent of the weight of the product. The described telephone was a radio extender, to increase the communication range of which not only an antenna was used, but also a counterweight (grounding substitute), without which the communication range was reduced to two kilometers. To create a mobile communications network, Nemtsov proposed using millimeter waves in the future, with the base station antenna suspended on a balloon.
In any case, Nemtsov’s book pushed domestic radio amateurs and designers to attempt to create a mobile phone.

Independently of Nemtsov, the idea of a telephone radio extender was implemented in the United States by 23-year-old radio amateur Carl Mac Brainard, as reported in Popular Mechanics magazine for June 1946 in an article with the catchy title “Alladin was a Piker,” p. 108-111, 240. However, Brainard was never able to create a wearable device with a long range, and he found a simple solution: he placed a repeater in his car. In this case, the wearable part of Reynard's mobile phone was a small box that was attached to a golf bag. Shortwave range was used for communication; the communication radius of the car repeater with the house was 30 miles (about 50 km). The communication range of the wearable device with the repeater, according to the article, was insignificant (“He uses the radio in his car, parked nearby” - “He uses the radio station in his car, parked nearby”).
The phone used pulse dialing; from the description it can be assumed that it used separate channel(states that a "small transmitter in a vehicle" is used to transmit dialing signals). In fact, Brainard's design is primarily interesting as an attempt to circumvent the weight problems of a wearable device by using the phone in the car as a repeater. Karl Brainard came to the idea of his future device while still a student, in 1942, and patented a number of solutions. It took four years to go from idea to working design.
Brainard began to get involved in radio at the age of 12. After graduating, he worked for several years at a defense company and served in the navy. The color-musical installation he created using gas-discharge lamps was used commercially, and he even received a contract for 130 thousand dollars to create similar installations for jukeboxes. At the same time, the mobile radio extender he created was not developed, despite the creation of car telephone networks in the United States. Most likely, this happened because for the consumer in most cases it is easier to go to the phone in the car, or carry a small pager, rather than a weighty suitcase.

In December 1947, Douglas Ring and Ray Young, employees of the American company Bell, proposed the principle of hexagonal cells for mobile telephony. This happened right in the midst of intense efforts to create a phone that could be used to make calls from a car. The first such service was launched in 1946 in St. Louis by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1947 a system was launched with intermediate stations along the highway, allowing calls from a car on the way from New York to Boston. However, due to imperfections and high cost, these systems were not commercially successful. In 1948, another American telephone company in Richmond managed to establish an auto-dialing car radio telephone service, which was already better. The weight of the equipment of such systems was tens of kilograms and it was placed in the trunk, so the thought of a pocket version did not arise for an inexperienced person to look at it.

However, as noted in the same 1946 in the journal “Science and Life”, No. 10, domestic engineers G. Shapiro and I. Zakharchenko developed a telephone communication system from a moving car with a city network, the mobile device of which had a power of only 1 watt and fit under the instrument panel. The power was from a car battery.
The telephone number assigned to the car was connected to the radio installed at the city telephone exchange. To call a city subscriber, you had to turn on the device in the car, which sent your call signs on the air. They were perceived by the base station on the city PBX and the telephone set immediately turned on, working like a regular telephone. When calling a car, the city subscriber dialed the number, this activated the base station, the signal of which was received by the device on the car.

As can be seen from the description, this system was something like a radio tube. During experiments carried out in 1946 in Moscow, a range of the device was achieved over 20 km, and a conversation with Odessa was carried out with excellent audibility. Subsequently, the inventors worked to increase the radius of the base station to 150 km.

It was expected that the telephone system of Shapiro and Zakharchenko would be widely used in the work of fire brigades, air defense units, police, emergency medical and technical assistance. However, there was no further information about the development of the system. It can be assumed that it was considered more expedient for emergency rescue services to use their own departmental communication systems rather than use the GTS.

In the United States, the inventor Alfred Gross was the first to try to do the impossible. Since 1939, he was passionate about creating portable walkie-talkies, which decades later became known as “walkie-talkies.” In 1949, he created a device based on a walkie-talkie, which he called a “wireless remote telephone.” The device could be carried with you, and it gave the owner a signal to answer the phone. It is believed that this was the first simple pager. Gross even implemented it in one of the hospitals in New York, but telephone companies showed no interest in this new product, or in his other ideas in this direction. So America lost the chance to become the birthplace of the first practically working mobile phone.

L.I. Kupriyanovich at work. "Smena", No. 5 1955, p. 24.

However, these ideas were developed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USSR. So, one of those who continued the search in the field of mobile communications in our country was Leonid Kupriyanovich. He was born on July 14, 1929, and in 1953 he graduated from the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School with a degree in Radio Electronics, Faculty of Instrument Engineering. According to journalist A. Osipov ("Pocket Radio Station", magazine "Smena", No. 5, 1955, p. 24), while still a student at the Moscow Higher Technical School, he designed a portable walkie-talkie weighing about 2 kilograms, which fit in a field bag. At that time, this was considered a successful design; similar radio stations could be seen at the All-Union Exhibition of Amateur Radio Designers. But Kupriyanovich was not satisfied with this. According to the same youth magazine "Smena", Leonid Ivanovich was fond of mountaineering and was even a discharge athlete. When climbing, radio communication with the base and with comrades is vital; but every gram of equipment takes away the strength of a person conquering the peak at the limit of physical capabilities. A walkie-talkie in a bag is no good! You need a small device that you can carry in your pocket and hold with one hand.

Kupriyanovich's pocket radio from 1954. ("Radio", 12, 1955, pp. 32-33)

And Kupriyanovich, already an engineer, gets to work again. As a member of the central DOSAAF radio club, he could create and test such devices on his own initiative - radio sports are important for the country's defense. Soon he creates a completely new walkie-talkie, already weighing 1.2 kilograms, and with a communication range of 3 kilometers. In 1954, at the 7th city exhibition in Moscow, this walkie-talkie won a first degree diploma. But a kilogram is also a lot. The young engineer again starts work from scratch, and a year later a walkie-talkie appears, which, together with batteries, weighs only three hundred grams, and is only slightly larger in size than two matchboxes. The low power supply voltage of the walkie-talkie is also unusual for contemporaries - only 15-18 volts. At the 12th All-Union Exhibition of Radio Amateur Creativity in Leningrad, the radio station received a first degree diploma, and, as they write in No. 24 of the Smena magazine for 1955, “transferred for mass production.” According to the article by N. Kazansky “Short-wave and ultra-short-wave equipment” in the magazine “Radio” No. 9, 1955, p. 31-32, and the official publication of DOSAAF “The Best Designs of the 12th Radio Exhibition”, published in 1957, p. 157-158, the radio station was called "Pocket VHF telephone", had dimensions of 110 * 68 * 30 mm. and weighed 350 g, assembled according to a transceiver circuit using 0.6P2B lamps, 2P1P and 1P3B lamps, operates in the range of 38-40 MHz, has a microphone and a miniature earphone built into the body, and has a radius of 1 km. Motorola products from 1955 were much heavier.

The press of that time reported very little about Kupriyanovich’s personality. It was known that he lived in Moscow, his activities were sparingly characterized by the press as a “radio engineer” or “radio amateur.” The family knew that Leonid Ivanovich worked at the institute from among the “boxes”. At that time, for enterprises in the radio-electronic industry, the status of a “box” was commonplace; entire armies of workers, engineers, scientists and managers throughout the country did not say anything about their work, and in the press or on television they could be called “Soviet mechanical engineers” or something. something like that. And this is not surprising - the safety of the entire people depended on the safety of these people. It is also known that Kupriyanovich could be considered a very successful person at that time - in the early 60s he had a car.

1957 - walkie-talkie from a matchbox

Kupriyanovich's wrist radio

The 1960 publication describes a simple radio with just three transistors that can be worn on the wrist - much like the famous watch-talkie from the film "Off Season". The author offered it for repetition to tourists and mushroom pickers, but in real life it was mainly students who showed interest in this design of Kupriyanovich - for tips on exams, which was even included in an episode of Gaidaev’s film comedy “Operation Y”.

In 1957 L.I. Kupriyanovich received an author's certificate for "Radiophone" - an automatic radiotelephone with direct dialing. Through an automatic telephone radio station from this device it was possible to connect with any subscriber of the telephone network within the range of the Radiofon transmitter. By that time, the first operating set of equipment was ready, demonstrating the principle of operation of the “Radiophone”, called LK-1 by the inventor (Leonid Kupriyanovich, first sample).
By our standards, the LK-1 was still difficult to call a mobile phone, but it made a great impression on its contemporaries. “The telephone device is small in size, its weight does not exceed three kilograms,” wrote Science and Life. "The power batteries are placed inside the body of the device; their continuous use period is 20-30 hours. LK-1 has 4 special radio tubes, so that the power supplied by the antenna is sufficient for short-wave communications over a distance of 20-30 kilometers. The device has 2 antennas; Its front panel has 4 call switches, a microphone (outside of which headphones are connected) and a dial for dialing."

Just like in a modern cell phone, Kupriyanovich’s device was connected to the city telephone network through a base station (the author called it ATR - automatic telephone radio station), which received signals from mobile phones to the wired network and transmitted signals from the wired network to mobile phones. 50 years ago, the principles of operation of a mobile phone were described for inexperienced cleaners simply and figuratively: “The ATP connection with any subscriber occurs like a regular telephone, only we control its operation from a distance.”
To operate the mobile phone with the base station, four communication channels were used at four frequencies: two channels were used for transmitting and receiving sound, one for dialing and one for hanging up.

The reader may suspect that the LK-1 was a simple radio tube for a telephone. But it turns out that this is not so.
“The question involuntarily arises: won’t several simultaneously operating LK-1s interfere with each other?” - writes the same “Science and Life”. “No, because in this case, the device uses different tonal frequencies, which force its relays to operate on the ATP (the tonal frequencies will be transmitted on the same wavelength). The frequencies of sound transmission and reception for each device will be different in order to avoid their mutual influence.”

Thus, in LK-1 there was encoding of the number in the telephone itself, and not depending on the wire line, which allows it to be rightfully considered as the first mobile phone. True, judging by the description, this coding was very primitive, and the number of subscribers who had the opportunity to work through one ATP was at first very limited. In addition, in the first demonstrator, the ATP was simply connected to a regular telephone parallel to the existing subscriber point - this made it possible to begin experiments without making changes to the city PBX, but made it difficult to simultaneously “go into the city” from several handsets. However, in 1957 the LK-1 existed in only one copy.
Nevertheless, the practical possibility of implementing a wearable mobile phone and organizing such a mobile communication service, at least in the form of departmental switches, has been proven. “The range of the device... is several tens of kilometers,” writes Leonid Kupriyanovich in a note for the July 1957 issue of the magazine “Young Technician”. “If within these limits there is only one receiving device, this will be enough to talk with any city resident who has a telephone, and for any number of kilometers.” “Radiotelephones...can be used on vehicles, on airplanes and ships. Passengers will be able to call home, to work, or book a hotel room directly from the plane. It will find use among tourists, builders, hunters, etc.”

In addition, Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would be able to displace phones built into cars. At the same time, the young inventor immediately used something like a “hands free” headset, i.e. A speakerphone was used instead of an earpiece. In an interview with M. Melgunova, published in the magazine "Behind the Wheel", 12, 1957, Kupriyanovich intended to introduce mobile phones in two stages. “In the beginning, while there are few radiotelephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near the car owner’s home telephone. But later, when there are thousands of such devices, ATP will no longer work for one radiotelephone, but for hundreds and thousands. Moreover, all of them will not interfere with each other, since each of them will have its own tone frequency, causing its own relay to work." Thus, Kupriyanovich essentially positioned two types of household appliances at once - simple radio handsets, which were easier to put into production, and a mobile phone service, in which one base station serves thousands of subscribers.

One can be surprised how accurately Kupriyanovich imagined more than half a century ago how widely the mobile phone would become part of our everyday life.
“By taking such a radiophone with you, you are essentially taking an ordinary telephone set, but without wires,” he wrote a couple of years later. “Wherever you are, you can always be found by phone; you just have to dial the known number of your radiophone from any landline phone (even from a pay phone). A phone rings in your pocket and you start a conversation. If necessary You can dial any city telephone number directly from a tram, trolleybus, or bus, call an ambulance, fire truck or emergency vehicle, or contact your home..."
It's hard to believe that these words were written by a person who has not visited the 21st century. However, for Kupriyanovich there was no need to travel to the future. He built it.

In 1958, Kupryanovich, at the request of radio amateurs, published in the February issue of the magazine "Young Technician" a simplified design of the device, the ATR of which can only work with one radio tube and does not have the function of long-distance calls.

LK-1 and base station. YuT, 2, 1958.

Using such a mobile phone was somewhat more difficult than modern ones. Before calling a subscriber, it was necessary, in addition to the receiver, to also turn on the transmitter on the handset. Having heard a long telephone beep in the earpiece and made the appropriate switches, one could proceed to dialing the number. But it was still more convenient than on radio stations of that time, since there was no need to switch from receiving to transmitting and ending each phrase with the word “Reception!” At the end of the conversation, the load transmitter turned itself off to save batteries.

The 1958 model of a mobile phone, including its power source, weighed only 500 grams.

This milestone was again taken by world technical thought only... March 6, 1983, i.e. a quarter of a century later. True, Kupriyanovich’s model was not so elegant and was a box with toggle switches and a round dialer disk, to which a regular telephone handset was connected via a wire. It turned out that when talking, either both hands were occupied, or the box had to be hung on the belt. On the other hand, holding a light plastic tube from a household phone in your hands was much more convenient than a device with the weight of an army pistol (According to Martin Cooper, using a mobile phone helped him pump up his muscles well).
According to Kupriyanovich’s calculations, his device should have cost 300-400 Soviet rubles. As it turned out from other publications, this was the price before the monetary reform of 1961, i.e. 30-40 rubles “new”. In the late 50s, simple transistor radios had similar retail prices, so we can assume that this is an underestimate. On the other hand, based on the fact that technically the radiophone was hardly more complex than semiconductor televisions, we can assume that its price after technological development could have been kept within 150-200 rubles “new”, which is equivalent to approximately 2.5 times the average monthly salary in 1958 year. Since at that time, the first goal for citizens was to buy a TV, washing machine and refrigerator, the market capacity of such devices in private ownership, if sold in installments in those days, would be comparable to the market capacity of amateur movie cameras (several hundred thousand). Commercial mobile phones of the early 80s with a price of 3500-4000 US dollars were also not affordable for all Americans - the millionth subscriber appeared only in 1990.
According to L.I. Kupriyanovich in his article published in the February 1959 issue of the journal “Technology for Youth”, it was now possible to place up to a thousand communication channels of radiophones with the Asia-Pacific region on one wavelength. To do this, the encoding of the number in the radiophone was done in a pulsed manner, and during a conversation the signal was compressed using a device that the author of the radiophone called a correlator. According to the description in the same article, the work of the correlator was based on the vocoder principle - dividing the speech signal into several frequency ranges, compressing each range and subsequent restoration at the reception site. True, voice recognition should have deteriorated, but given the quality of wired communications at that time, this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing an ATP on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees fifteen years later installed a base station on top of a 50-story building in New York). And judging by the phrase “pocket radiophones made by the author of this article,” we can conclude that in 1959 Kupriyanovich manufactured at least two experimental mobile phones.

In 1959, Kupriyanovich’s invention appeared on the pages of the most prestigious magazine in the USSR, Ogonyok. The inventor is invited to a meeting of the creative club at the magazine, which is called “On Ogonyok”. Together with Kupriyanovich, one of the most popular jazz composers of the USSR, Anatoly Yakovlevich Lepin, talks about his creative successes. Yes, yes, the same one who wrote the music for “Carnival Night”, and that year the whole country sang another of his songs - “If the accordion could…”. Another guest of the famous magazine is a foreigner: German documentary filmmaker, famous anti-fascist Andre Thorndike. Now they would say that the young engineer was among the “stars”
“By possessing a portable radiotelephone, which is assigned a city network number, a subscriber can be called from anywhere he is. The use of a wireless telephone will significantly expand the telephone network, first within the Soviet Union, and later beyond its borders.” This is exactly what was written in issue 7 of Ogonyok magazine for 1959. The Soviet mobile communications network was to become international.

If the editors only knew what a cult object the mobile phone would become at the beginning of the next century, a photograph of both the phone and the inventor would certainly have appeared on the cover. However, in those days there were other events that were considered more important, at least for the press. The XXI Congress of the CPSU has ended. If Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev knew that the mobile phone would become one of the main arguments for technical advantage USA, he would have shown Kupriyanovich’s phone number from the rostrum of the congress, and invited the USA to catch up. But the recently launched third satellite shocked the Americans much more. In addition, one of the world's fastest whaling bases, "Soviet Ukraine", came off the slipway, and in the model house of the Moscow City Economic Council they showed nylon fur coats (also the future, but closer). Therefore, they write about a mobile phone on page 29, after a report about how the congress delegates look at the Ural-375 miracle machine at VDNKh - “this truck will not know any obstacles in its path.”

In 1960, Kupriyanovich’s mobile phone was exhibited at VDNKh, in the “Radio Electronics and Communications” pavilion that had just opened after reconstruction. A small device could hardly become a sensation - the attention of visitors to the pavilion was attracted by luxurious television and radio combines, of which there were as many as five models on display, and a miracle of modern technology - color TVs in American NTSC standard, a TV in a chess table and a TV for a car, stereo systems, pocket receivers and even a radio microphone, without which not a single concert can be performed now. In this fireworks of miracles, the mobile phone was difficult to notice.

In 1961 L.I. Kupriyanovich shows APN correspondents Yuri Rybchinsky and V. Shcherbakov... a pocket mobile phone. Seeing this device, a modern reader will probably exclaim, “It can’t be!” In fact, to create a phone in 1961 with the size of a 21st century handheld is completely incredible. However, APN, the Novosti Press Agency, created in the same 1961 on the basis of the former Sovinformburo, is a very respectable organization, whose tasks are to convey information about the USSR to foreign media. There can’t be any unverified facts that threaten revelations and scandals here.
I believe that the reader has already come to his senses after seeing the Soviet handheld, and can calmly perceive the other data of the device. Kupriyanovich brought the weight of a mobile phone to just 70 grams. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, not all mobile phones can boast of this. True, the functions of the 1961 handheld are minimal, there is no display and the dialer is small - you'll probably have to turn it with a pencil. But there is no better place anywhere in the world yet, and there won’t be for a long time. According to Rybchinsky’s description, this Kupriyanovich device had two transmitters and one receiver, was assembled on semiconductors and was powered by nickel-cadmium batteries, which were used in mobile phones at the beginning of the new century. The communication range with the base station was stated to be 80 km.

And finally, we come to the climax. APN correspondents reported that the presented mobile phone is “the latest model of a new device, prepared for serial production at one of the Soviet enterprises.”
That's exactly what it says - "prepared for serial production." The fact that the plant is not listed is not surprising at that time. There have been cases when the manufacturer of consumer electronics was not even indicated in the operating instructions.
“Already, many experts consider the new means of communication to be a serious rival to the conventional telephone.” - APN correspondent informed readers. - “Transport, industrial and agricultural enterprises, geological exploration parties, construction - this is not a complete list of possible areas of application of telephone communications without wires. In order to serve a city like Moscow with radiophonic communications, only ten automatic telephone radio stations will be needed. The first of these stations are designed in the new metropolitan area - Mazilovo."
And, of course, plans for the future. L.I. Kupriyanovich sets himself the task of creating a mobile phone the size of a matchbox and a range of 200 kilometers.
In parallel with the APN report, information from another Soviet mass media giant, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), appeared in the Soviet press. TASS transmitted information about the most important, sensational events in the life of the country, such as space flights, and was even authorized to make statements on serious foreign policy issues on its own behalf, reflecting the government’s point of view. The TASS article in Orlovskaya Pravda was shorter and did not contain photographs, but it confirmed the following facts:
- Kupriyanovich created a new model of mobile phone;
- the new sample can be carried in your pocket;
- the telephone contains a receiver and two transmitters;
- powered by nickel-cadmium batteries.
Unlike the APN information, the TASS message indicated a communication range with the base station of 25 kilometers, but this range depended on which base station it was indicated for. If the APN message meant the designed base station, and the TASS message meant the one with which the prototype was tested, then there is no contradiction between the data. Accordingly, from the TASS report it follows that the microphone and telephone are built into the device, and the base station is connected to many telephones.
Kupriyanovich announced the decision to create a handheld device at least in 1960. In his article “Wireless telephone apparatus”, published in the journal “Scientific and Technical Societies of the USSR., Volume 2, Issues 7-12, Profizdat, 1960, C.,” he wrote: “A wireless telephone apparatus - a radiophone is convenient in that it can use in any conditions. Small metal box fits freely in the palm of your hand..."

“Currently, serial production of radiophones is being prepared at one of our enterprises,” confirms L.I. Kupriyanovich in his note “Radiophone”, published in issue 11 of the magazine “Inventor and Innovator” for 1961. The article confirms that several samples of radiophones have been created. True, the attached photo is not a handheld, but a sample in a 1958 case, but without a handset and external antenna. The data for this model given in the article differs from those published previously: the weight is not 500, but 300 grams. The device is assembled on semiconductors, powered by nickel-cadmium batteries should ensure the operation of the device for 30-50 hours. But this is unlikely to surprise those who have been involved in amateur radio - when improving the design, enthusiasts often add new “filling” to a previously made housing. According to Kupriyanovich’s estimates, the device in mass production should have cost only 30-40 rubles. This price seems underestimated, and perhaps Kupriyanovich was simply based on the prices of components.
The same note briefly described the mobile communication system proposed by Kupriyanovich. “To increase the number of radiophones capable of simultaneously operating on the same wavelength, but in different areas, the APR coverage area over the air is divided into microdistricts. In each microdistrict, set-top boxes for the APR are installed, operating on the same wavelength, and connected in parallel to the telephone network. The coverage areas of the APR set-top boxes overlap. Thus, when moving from one microdistrict to another, communication is not interrupted. Up to several hundred portable radiophones can work on one APR set-top box."
From this description we can conclude that Kupriyanovich was trying to create a system with the functions of cellular communications, but operating on a different principle. Although from the description it is still not clear what will happen if several mobile phone owners working on the same wavelength enter the same microdistrict.

Another presentation of the operation of such a mobile communication system can be found in the popular article by F. Chestnov, “ATS in Space,” published in the July issue of the magazine “Knowledge-Power” for 1961, p. 6-7.
"Pocket radiotelephones based on semiconductors and micromodules will eventually become available everyone(my italics - O.I.) and then it will become possible to realize the old and cherished dream of signalmen - the so-called universal communication, designed to connect all people with a constantly operating pocket telephone."
Some people like to speculate that mobile phones would never have been allowed in the USSR. As you can see, already in 1961 it was believed that every Soviet citizen should have a mobile phone and operate constantly.
In the article by F. Chestnov, the proposed communication system did not have a cellular, but a hierarchical structure, which made it possible to circumvent the problems associated with the transition from one base station to another. The call signal received by one of the regional base stations was transmitted to the central base station, the range of which covered all areas, was relayed and received on the mobile phone of a subscriber located in the coverage area of any of the regional stations. Having received the call signal, the subscriber answered the call. If the subscriber was in another city, the signal was transmitted to the central base station of that city via a satellite communication channel. Note that at this time the number of cargo launches into orbit around the world could be counted on one hand. “You will be able to talk on the phone at any time from anywhere in the world!” - wrote F. Chestnov.
Of course, compared to modern cellular systems communication, hierarchical had its drawbacks. First of all, it was difficult to provide continuous coverage of the area due to the increase in the number of central base stations with a large range and communication channels between them. In sparsely populated areas, for example, in virgin lands, it was assumed that they would use a satellite phone. The hierarchical system was most beneficial for providing mobile communications to large cities. Thus, although this communication system did not make it possible in practice to fully provide the entire population with mobile communication services, it was, nevertheless, a real competitor to cellular until the 90s.

And then there was silence - at least in leading popular science publications. According to data that requires verification, in 1963 the magazine Ogonyok wrote about Kupriyanovich’s mobile phone.
At the same time, the same publications continue to publish other articles by the inventor. In the February 1960 issue of UT, Kupriyanovich published a description of a radio station with automatic calling and a range of 40-50 km, and in the January 1961 issue of Techniques for Youth, a popular article on microelectronics technologies, “Radio Receiver under a Microscope.” In the November issue of TM there is another article: “Europe is looking at Red Square.” All this, of course, is necessary and relevant, but what about the global achievement of our Soviet science?

All this is so strange and unusual that it involuntarily suggests the thought: was there really a working radiophone?

6. “I AM TORROUNDED BY VARIABLE DOUBT.”

Skeptics first of all pay attention to the fact that the publications that popular science publications devoted to the radiophone did not cover the sensational fact of the first telephone calls. It is also impossible to accurately determine from photographs whether the inventor is calling on a cell phone or is simply posing. This gives rise to a version: yes, there was an attempt to create a mobile phone, but technically the device could not be completed, so no more was written about it. However, let us think about the question: why on earth should journalists of the late 50s and early 60s consider the call itself a separate event worthy of mention in the press? “So this means a telephone? Not bad, not bad. And it turns out you can also make calls with it? It’s just a miracle! I would never believe it!”
Common sense dictates that not a single Soviet popular science magazine would write about a non-working structure in 1957-1961. Such magazines already had something to write about. Satellites fly in space, and then humans. Physicists have found that a cascade hyperon decays into a lambda-zero particle and a negative pi-meson. Sound technicians restored the original sound of Lenin's voice. Thanks to the TU-104, you can get from Moscow to Khabarovsk in 11 hours 35 minutes. Computers translate from one language to another and play chess. Construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station has begun. Schoolchildren from the Chkalovskaya station made a robot that sees and speaks. Against the backdrop of these events, the creation of a mobile phone is not a sensation at all. Readers are waiting for video phones! “Telephone sets with screens can be built even today, our technology is strong enough,” they write in the same “TM” ... in 1956. “Millions of television viewers are waiting for the radio industry to start producing televisions with color images... It’s high time to think about television broadcasting over wires (cable TV - O.I.),” we read in the same issue. And here, you see, the mobile phone is somehow outdated, even without a video camera and a color display. Well, who would write even half a word about her if she didn’t work?
Then why did the “first call” begin to be considered a sensation? The answer is simple: it has only become a sensation now. On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper held a PR campaign. In order for Motorola to obtain permission to use radio frequencies for civilian mobile communications from the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC), it was necessary to somehow show that mobile communications really had a future. Moreover, competitors were vying for the same frequencies. And it’s no coincidence that Martin Cooper’s first call, according to his own story to San Francisco Chronicle journalists, was addressed to a rival: “It was a guy from AT&T who was promoting phones for cars. His name was Joel Angel. I called him and told him that I was calling from the street , from a real "handheld" cell phone. I don't remember what he answered. But you know, I heard his teeth grinding."
It was difficult to find information about the fateful call in the American press. More precisely, not about the call itself, but about creating a phone. It appears that Popular Science readers did not see the event in the date and time of the first call. The main event was the use of a minicomputer for the base station. Back then it occupied an entire closet.

Kupriyanovich did not need to share frequencies with a competing company in 1957 - 1961 and listen to their gnashing of teeth on a mobile phone. He did not even need to catch up and overtake America, due to the absence of other participants in the race. Like Cooper, Kupriyanovich also carried out PR campaigns - as was customary in the USSR. He came to the editorial offices of popular science publications, demonstrated the devices, and wrote articles about them himself. It is likely that the letters “YUT” in the name of the first device are a device to interest the editors of “Young Technician” to publish it. For unknown reasons, the topic of the radiophone was only covered by the country's leading amateur radio magazine - "Radio", as well as all other Kupriyanovich designs - except for the pocket radio of 1955.

Did Kupriyanovich himself have any motives to show how to create and show journalists over the course of an entire five-year period as many as three different non-working devices - for example, in order to achieve success or recognition? In publications of the 50s, the inventor’s place of work is not indicated; the media present him to readers as a “radio amateur” or “engineer.” However, it is known that Leonid Ivanovich lived and worked in Moscow, he was awarded the academic degree of Candidate of Technical Sciences, he subsequently worked at the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and in the early 60s had a car (for which, by the way, he himself created a radiotelephone and an anti-theft radio alarm) . In other words, by Soviet standards he was very successful. Two of Kupriyanovich's inventions were patented in the USA in the 70s. Doubters can also check a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including the LK-1 adapted for young technicians.
Let's look at the question from the other side. Maybe at that time in the USA there were many similar amateur designs? Let's open the February 1958 issue of Modern Mechanics with an article by John Robinson Pierce, director of telecommunications research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, entitled "Telephones of Tomorrow." Who else but him should know about this.
“Does this (the appearance of pocket pagers - O.I.) convince us of the possibility of a telephone in every car, or maybe even in every pocket?” - writes Mr. Pierce. “Technically, this will soon be possible. We can create a miniature transistor receiver that can operate 24 hours a day without significantly draining the car battery. Together with a suitable transmitter, a car phone can be placed in the glove compartment or combined with a radio. Pocket phones would also be absurd."
If we assume that the head of Bell's research departments speaks absolutely sincerely, then it turns out that in 1958 he had not heard anything about such telephones in the United States. He just thinks the idea is not crazy. Of course in the future.
Don't think that Americans never dreamed of such a phone. In September 1956, the same magazine published a fascinating article, "Your Phone of Tomorrow." About how one night in the future, on Market Street in San Francisco, a young man calls his friend in Rome on his cell phone. With video. With 3-D video. In the America of the future, every baby will be given a telephone number from birth. If a person cannot be reached, it means he has died. Here is such an optimistic forecast.
The radiophone played, perhaps, only one important role in Kupriyanovich’s life - it determined the choice of his life path. “Leonid Kupriyanovich worked on his invention for several years, first as an amateur, and then radio engineering became his profession.” - wrote Yuri Rybchinsky.

Doubters can also check a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including the LK-1 adapted for young technicians. This is what they did, for example, in 1959 at the Arkhangelsk Electrical Technical College of Communications, second-year student Nikolai Sulakov, Vyacheslav Krotov and others under the guidance of the technical school teacher Konstantin Petrovich Gashchenko. Having read in the magazine "Young Technician" about Kupriyanovich's inventions, they created their own simplified version of a radiotelephone (radio tube), operating in the 38 MHz range. True, the details were more complicated (for example, a thermal relay had to be installed in the release circuit). Subsequently, a portable device was created, which Sulakov turned out to weigh 2 kilograms with batteries; the tuning stability and range were inferior to Kupriyanovich’s device, but for the student’s design it was not so bad. Sulakov used the army radio station 12-RP as a base station. Further work on the mobile phone was stopped for a completely prosaic reason - the creator was puzzled by the question “Why do I need such a phone?” However, thanks to this work, Nikolai Sulakov received a prize for participating in an exhibition of communications technical schools in Odessa and was able to transfer to the radio department.

Only in real life the development of events does not fit into this simple scheme.

First of all, bureaucratic obstacles to cellular communications existed in both the USSR and the USA. It took the FCC 21 years to officially authorize widespread use of cell phones by civilians. On the other hand, in the USSR, issues of the use of radio communications by civilians were resolved quite quickly, if it was not personal, but official use. In the 60s, the national automobile communication service “Altai” was launched in the USSR, which was quite good for that time. Then maybe bureaucratic thoughtlessness is to blame? They say that officials did not appreciate the merits of cellular communications and did not give it a go. Moreover, one of the authoritative experts said: “Cell phones have no future, while communications in cars are already used today”... Stop. But these words were spoken not in 1959, but in 1973, not in the USSR, but in the USA, and this was stated by the private Bell company. Moreover, based on motives familiar from Soviet production films, the company promoted a car communication device weighing 14 kilograms. The further development of cellular communications in the United States also resembled a plot from a Soviet movie. After Cooper's historic call, cell phones had not yet been approved by the FCC and could not hit the shelves. Because of this, Americans wishing to acquire an expensive new product were forced to sign up in queues 5-10 years in advance. It was possible to correct the situation only in 1983, and in a purely Soviet way - “through pull.” The founder of Motorola, Paul Galvin, using his personal connections and acquaintance with US Vice President George W. Bush, was able to get him a meeting with Ronald Reagan. The main argument in the conversation was purely political - Japan could catch up and surpass America in cellular communications. The fate of the development was literally decided by a call from above.

Could such a story happen in the USSR? She could. Moreover, it happened in the late 50s, as they say, after the visit of a government delegation to Japan (and here Japan played a role). A Decree was issued by the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR on the development of a new VHF radiotelephone communication system, in which a number of enterprises and institutes were appointed as the developers of this system: State Union Design Institute (GSPI), Moscow, Research Institute of Switching Technology, Leningrad, Research Institute communications, Voronezh, and the Dalnyaya Svyaz plant, Leningrad. The project received the code "Altai-1". Work on the project began in 1958, and in 1959 the Altai system received a Gold Medal at the Brussels International Exhibition.

From the very beginning, Altai had specific customers on whom the allocation of funds depended. In addition, the main problem in implementing both projects was not at all in creating a portable device, but in the need for significant investments and time in creating a communication infrastructure and its debugging and the costs of its maintenance. During the deployment of Altai, for example, in Kyiv, transmitter output lamps failed, and in Tashkent, problems arose due to poor-quality installation of base station equipment. As Radio magazine wrote, in 1968 the Altai system was deployed only in Moscow and Kyiv; Samarkand, Tashkent, Donetsk and Odessa were next in line.
Mobile communications in the early 60s in any country would have been a fairly expensive service that only a small part of the population could afford. The potential customer - a major Western businessman or a Soviet leader - did not then have any need to carry a phone in his pocket. At work or at home, they were provided with wired communications, and in the open air they always had a car with a driver at their service, where they did not have to think about the dimensions and weight of the equipment. From this point of view, Altai corresponded well to the demand of that time. Eight transmitters served up to 500-800 subscribers, and the transmission quality was comparable only to digital communications. The implementation of this project looked more realistic than the deployment of a national cellular network based on Radiofon.

However, the idea of a mobile phone, despite its apparent untimeliness, was not buried at all. There were also industrial samples of the device!

8. UNDER THE BALKAN STARS.

In the early 60s, the echo of publications about Kupriyanovich’s radiophone had not yet subsided. So, in the book by K.K. Boboshko "Interesting to know" mentions a 1958 model. In 1964, this invention was also written about in Bulgaria, in the third issue of the teenage popular science magazine "Cosmos". At the same time, a device was described in a plastic case of smaller dimensions than it was in the 1958 photograph - 110 * 80 * 30 mm, although heavier - 700 grams, made entirely of transistors. Instead of a handset (according to the text description), the device used a piezo-crystal speaker, which also served as a loudspeaker; Nickel-cadmium batteries were used for power supply; the range of the device was 80 km. It was also reported that the radiophone would be widely used in industry, agriculture and rescue services, and Kupriyanovich himself is working on an improved model, the range of which will be 200 kilometers!

As the Bulgarian magazine "E-vestik.bg" later wrote, Bachvarov created two experimental samples of mobile phones, for which he received the Dimitrov Prize. In an interview with journalist Zornitsa Veselinova, Bachvarov reported that the mobile phone was exhibited by him in the USSR at an exhibition in Moscow, was shown to cosmonauts A. Leonov, N. Rukavishnikov and P. Belyaev, “but for mass production it required American and Japanese transistors,” the use of which, according to Bachvarov, it was not agreed upon.
According to unverified data, Bachvarov's experimental sample had two communication channels, operated in the frequency range 60-70 MHz and was used as a demonstrator; the second sample of the device was handed over to the head of state T. Zhivkov for promotional purposes. That is, according to these data, Bachvarov’s prototype consisted of two long-range radio tubes. Publications sometimes state that Bachvarov allegedly invented “the essence of today’s jiesem” in 1959, which is incorrect, because The GSM standard specification has been in development since 1982 and was published in 1992.
A description of the phone was published in the Bulgarian magazine “Science and Technology for Mladezhta” 7-8, 1965. It was reported that until 1965, Hristo Bachvarov was in charge of the design bureau at the Research and Design Institute of Electrical Industry in Sofia. According to this publication, the phone used a RATC-6 base station, which allowed it to connect up to 15 subscribers. With a mobile phone transmitter power of 0.2 watts, communication with the base station was ensured within a radius of 12 kilometers. An amplifier with a power of 2 watts could be connected to the phone, which increased the communication radius to 50-60 kilometers. The transmitter frequency was 38 MHz, and the receiver with a sensitivity of 2 μV operated at a frequency of 27.125 MHz. A combined microphone and loudspeaker on the front panel was used for conversation. The duration of operation with equal operating time for reception and transmission was 20 hours, the power source was nickel-cadmium batteries.
Article in the newspaper "Football", October 6, 1965. No. 40 (88) reported on Bachvarov as the director of a research laboratory at the State Committee for Science and Technical Progress, and indicated a range of 50 km (probably including an amplifier).

At the Inforga-65 exhibition, the Bulgarian company Radioelectronics demonstrated a mobile phone that could work with a base station for 15 subscribers. This phone was positioned as a competitor to the pager system known abroad. “Bulgarian designers took a different path,” wrote engineers Yu. Popov and Yu. Pukhnachev in their article “Inforga-65”, published in the magazine “Science and Life” number 8 for 1965. “To implement wireless communication, they used a system developed several years ago by the Soviet inventor, engineer L. Kupriyanovich. A special set-top box is connected to the city telephone network, serving 15 radiotelephones. During a conversation, its antenna picks up information coming from the radiotelephones and sends it to the telephone network "Transistor radiotelephones provide reliable two-way radio communications." This mobile phone was also shown in the documentary film "Inforga-65" VDNKh USSR (TsSDF Studio (RTSSDF), with the participation of VDNH USSR, director Rymarev D., cameraman Epifanov G., co-scripters Dmitryuk N. and Nadinsky V.), 1966 Igod, part No. 2.
So, the magazine “Science and Life” named Kupriyanovich, but not Bachvarov, the father of Bulgarian mobile communications. At a minimum, this means that during the development of the device, the groundwork created by L.I. was officially used. Kupriyanovich. The Radioelectronics device was larger in size than the Kupriyanovich device demonstrated in 1961; This is not at all surprising, because restrictions on the transfer of technology abroad, including to Eastern European countries, could have played a role here.
From the above, we can assume that the mobile phone presented at Inforga-65 worked with the RATC-6 base station, and the unverified information about the “radio tube” most likely referred to the prototype.
A year later, among the exhibits of the Bulgarian exposition at the Interorgtekhnika-66 exhibition were the so-called “automatic radiotelephones” PAT-0.5 and ATRT-0.5, which allow “to carry out radio communication on the VHF range with any telephone subscriber of the city, region and enterprise without a special device for his telephone." As you can see in the picture, this mobile phone already resembled a modern one (except, of course, for the dialer), fit easily in the hand and generally fit the description of 1964. The devices were assembled using transistors and could be included in any automatic telephone exchange using the RATC-10 base station.

Six mobile phones could initially operate simultaneously through one base station. This is, of course, less than Motorola's first base station, which had 30 subscribers, but in 1966, Motorola was still developing the first walkie-talkies. The limitation of the number of subscribers to six was due to the number distribution system: emergency numbers began with one, city numbers with zero, internal departmental numbers with nine, and one number had to be assigned to the base station operator; thus, without installing an additional switch, there were six numbers left for subscribers. Subsequently, systems for 69 and 699 numbers were created.
The channel selection system on “bricks,” as mobile phones were colloquially called in Bulgaria at that time, was simplified and had a number of disadvantages for the user. The channel could be selected either manually using two switches, or the selection was automatic under the influence of a frequency-modulated signal in the channel. The base station continuously transmitted a tone code of several tones in each channel. The mobile phone had several narrow-band filters for detecting tones after the demodulator, DIP switches for selecting “your” tones, and comparators for 8 or 12 bits from the 74 series. If a channel had its own tone code, then the mobile phone received and transmitted in this channel. If “its own” tone code was not found, the mobile phone switched transmission to the “general/service” channel, and the receiving channel began searching for its code sequentially across all channels. Channel channels were switched until the code appeared at the demodulator output.

The speech signal had amplitude modulation, and therefore the selection signal was perceived as significant background noise. Sometimes external noise entering the channel through the microphone led to spontaneous channel switching. Later they began to use timers that limited the noise to short “pings” every 4-6 seconds so that the mobile phone did not lose the channel.

If the Bulgarian device was shown at exhibitions on office equipment, then perhaps traces of Kupriyanovich’s mobile phone in the 60s should be looked for among office equipment? And such traces really are found. “For wireless two-way communication with moving objects, large enterprises use radio communication using, for example, a radiophone, which is a portable wireless telephone equipped with a dialer.” - a common phrase from books of the 60s.

In the first volume of the collection of articles “Cybernetics - at the service of communism,” published in 1961, edited by one of the founders of Soviet computer science, academician A.I. Berg, in the article by K.Ya. Sergeychuk “Problems of Communication and Cybernetics”, page 101, we read: “For automatic connection with moving objects, a radiophone has been developed, which is automatic telephone with a dialer for calling a subscriber of an automatic telephone exchange or a subscriber on a mobile object. Radiophones will find wide application where, for a number of reasons, it is impossible or impractical to lay cables or overhead wires (on mobile inter-shop transport, mobile cranes, construction sites, etc.) with difficult terrain."
The scientific and practical importance of this collection is evidenced by the fact that in the next section we find an article by A.I. Kitov, where he sets out the idea of creating the Internet in the USSR - at that level of technology, of course.
The mobile phone, as a means of departmental communication, was mentioned in the 60s and 70s by a number of publications devoted to the organization and planning of production.
“An interesting new means of communication, which, unfortunately, has not yet become widespread, is the radiophone proposed by L.I. Kupriyanovich... The technical data of the radiophone allow it to be used for installation on mobile inter-shop transport, mobile cranes, etc. Radiophone can be successfully used as an effective means..." (Operational and production planning at a machine-building enterprise. Ivanov, Nikolai Filippovich. M. Gosplanizdat, 1961.).
“Of the radio communication equipment presented at the exhibition, noteworthy equipment should be RTM, RTN and radiophone... The prototype radiophone shown at the exhibition allows for two-way communication within a radius of 20 - 25 km from the so-called automatic telephone radio station.” (Bulletin of Scientific Information "Labor and Wages", Volume 3, Issues 7-12 1960.).
“For control needs, a radiophone has recently been used. This is a combination of a walkie-talkie and a telephone. Thanks to this, the owner of a radiophone can be connected without wires like an ordinary subscriber...” (Control technology. Moscow University Publishing House, 1968, 162 p.)
"The radiophone is a wireless telephone. When dialing a city subscriber's number, the PBX occurs automatic connection with any subscriber of the city telephone network." (651.2 L 55. Liberman, V. B. Mechanization and automation of management work in an enterprise [Text]: a practical guide / V. B. Liberman, F. M. Rusinov. - M.: Economics , 1968.)
“As a means of institutional communication, a pocket-type radiotelephone is beginning to be used to communicate and call a subscriber, wherever he is...” (Organization of the work of the institution’s apparatus - Page 192 Lyudmila Nikolaevna Kachalina - Economics, 1970 - 207 p.)

Among the publications where the mobile phone is mentioned, even “Means of mechanization and automation at headquarters” by A.V. Prokofiev ("One of the first examples of such radio stations was a radiophone designed by the Soviet engineer L.I. Kupriyanovich...")
Thus, in the 60s, the need to produce mobile phones for the USSR, at least as a means of departmental communication, received scientific justification. Let us pay attention to the fact that the listed publications already mention not just development, but also implementation.
In 1965, in one of the issues of the Pskovskaya Pravda newspaper, a TASS note entitled “A radiotelephone has been created” was discovered. At first glance, it does not say anything new - we are talking about landline and car radiotelephones, one of the creators is Gennady Merkulov. However, this is not “Altai”, but alternative solutions for local facilities, and the most interesting information- in a few lines: “Currently the plant is developing a pocket radiotelephone with small-sized batteries, the total weight of which is about 500 grams.”

The plant where the radiotelephone is being developed is the Moscow "Kontrolpribor". The weight of the product coincides with the Kupriyanovich model developed in 1958. Whether we are talking about the very introduction of Kupriyanovich’s mobile phone, which was written about in 1961, or whether this is an independent development, has not yet been established. However, on page 322 of the book by L.V. Bobrov ("In Search of a Miracle" - M.: Young Guard, 1968. - 336 p.) there was a quote from the speech of the Minister of Radio Industry of the USSR V.D. Kalmykova: “New portable transistor radios weighing 800 grams and a portable radiotelephone will have great help in organizing communications in industry, transport, construction and agriculture." We are talking specifically about a portable radiotelephone, not a car one.

In the article by Alexey Bogomolov “Special phones for special people”, published in the newspaper “Top Secret”, No. 8/291, another mobile phone was mentioned. “In a photograph of the head of the Soviet government, Alexei Kosygin, taken during a walk in Kislovodsk in the mid-seventies, you can see a security officer with a small bag. In fact, it contained a mobile communication device of those years.” The non-pocket size of the phone was not at all explained by technical backwardness - as follows from A. Bogomolov’s article, the phone also had an information security system built into it. Based on the latter, Kosygin’s mobile phone was most likely a purely domestic development. Who was the creator of this design and how it was made has not been publicly reported until now.

10. WHAT ABOUT THE WEST?

Western European countries also attempted to create mobile communications before Cooper's historic call. Less than a year after Bulgaria demonstrated its mobile phones in Moscow, the November issue of Science & Mechanics magazine introduced the so-called Carry Phone as a new type of service. True, in terms of size and weight, the new Western technology was clearly inferior to the new Eastern technology. And for convenience too.

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In a market economy, when the demand for such a service was still unclear, government policy regarding such infrastructure was not defined, and investments in this market segment went specifically to the development of a car radiotelephone, this approach could be considered reasonable. Subsequently, in the USA, similar devices called “attache” phones” (portfolio phones) developed as a segment of the automotive communications market. In particular, they were produced by American companies Livermore, General Communication Systems, Integrated Systems Technology. “In business or on vacation, your portable phone is always at hand,” the advertisement said. By the way, at that time a mobile phone in the USA was a phone installed in a car, as in the Soviet Altai system. Most of such phones released in the USA at that time worked with the MTS network , some models had modifications for IMTS / MTS networks.This model of mobile telephony service lasted in the United States until the early 80s, until it began to experience competition from new generation cellular networks.

Another way to offer mobile service without significant investment in new communications infrastructure is telephone radio extenders. As noted in the September 1967 issue of the American magazine Popular Mechanics, Sibony Mfg.Corp in Greenwich, Connecticut, was offering the "New Pocket Telephone" - attachments to corded telephones that allowed communication with a small radio handset at a distance of 1-2 miles.

The disadvantage of the set-top box was that it could only receive incoming calls. Increasing the range of a radio extender was also hampered by the fact that each extender had to occupy its own frequency channel. As a result, despite its impressive design, the new product had a rather limited value for the communications market, and was subsequently supplanted by cordless handsets, which provided a short range but allowed both incoming and outgoing calls.

Radio extenders were also created, from which outgoing calls could also be made. Thus, the American company Satellite Phone communications offered in 1970 a radio extender not in the form of a handset, but in the form of an ordinary desk phone with a disk that could be carried from place to place and placed anywhere in the house. This pleasure was also quite decent even by American standards - $395, the same as a TV or microwave at that time. Such phones again remained a niche product for a limited number of consumers.

Thus, both briefcase phones and radio extenders have shown the limited possibility of creating a wearable mobile phone device using the existing IT infrastructure of a car or landline phone. The birth of the “mobile phone” now rests only on the emergence of a new infrastructure suitable for working with handheld communications devices.

April 11, 1972, i.e. one year before Cooper's call, the British company Pye Telecommunications demonstrated at the "Communications Today, Tomorrow and the Future" exhibition at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, a portable mobile phone that could be used to call the city. telephone network.

The mobile phone consisted of a Pocketphone 70 walkie-talkie, used by the police, and a set-top box - a handset with a push-button dial that could be held in your hands. The phone operated in the range of 450-470 MHz, judging by the Pocketphone 70 radio, it could have up to 12 channels and was powered by a 15 V source.

But let's return to the fate of Kupriyanovich. In the 60s, he moved away from creating radio stations and switched to a new direction, lying at the intersection of electronics and medicine - the use of cybernetics to expand the capabilities of the human brain. He publishes popular articles on hypnopedia - methods of teaching a person in a dream, and in 1970, the Nauka publishing house published his book "Reserves for Improving Memory. Cybernetic Aspects", in which, in particular, he examines the problems of "recording" information into the subconscious during special "sleep at the information level". To put a person into a state of such sleep, Kupriyanovich creates the “Rhythmoson” device and puts forward the idea of a new service - mass training of people in their sleep over the phone, and the biocurrents of people control the sleep devices through a central computer.
But this idea of Kupriyanovich remains unrealized, and in his book “Biological Rhythms and Sleep,” published in 1973, the “Ritmoson” apparatus is mainly positioned as a device for the correction of sleep disorders.
The reasons, perhaps, should be sought in the phrase from “Reserves for Improving Memory”: “The task of improving memory is to solve the problem of controlling the consciousness, and through it, to a large extent, the subconscious.” For a person in a state of sleep, at the information level, in principle, it is possible to write into memory not only foreign words for memorization, but also advertising slogans, background information designed for unconscious perception, and the person is not able to control this process, and may not even remember whether he is in a state of such sleep. Too many moral and ethical problems arise here, and current human society is clearly not ready for the mass use of such technologies.
Solutions in this area proposed by Kupriyanovich were protected by patents both in the USSR and abroad (inventor's certificates 500802, 506420, 1258420, 1450829, US patent 4289121, Canadian patent 1128136). The last copyright certificate was declared in 1987. Leonid Ivanovich also defended his dissertation on the topic “Research and development of an automated sleep control system” - this system was described in his monograph “Biological rhythms and sleep.” For 20 years (approximately until the early 90s, until retirement age), he used his device to treat patients. According to the testimony of Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences N.F. Izmerov, L.I. Kupriyanovich was periodically involved in carrying out work on closed topics, and, with the help of his staff, carried out the rehabilitation of major state leaders. Colleagues considered him a talented person and largely underestimated by his contemporaries. According to his daughter, he periodically recalled in conversations the times of working on a mobile phone as something bright and important. Kupriyanovich passed away in 1994.

Other mobile pioneers have also switched gears.

By the end of the war, Georgy Babat had focused on his other idea - transport powered by microwave radiation, made more than a hundred inventions, became a Doctor of Science, was awarded the Stalin Prize, and also became famous as the author of science fiction works.

Alfred Gross continued to work as a microwave and communications specialist for Sperry and General Electric. He continued to create until his death at the age of 82.

Martin Cooper headed a small private company, ArrayComm, which is promoting its own fast wireless Internet technology to the market. On the fortieth anniversary of the demonstration of his model, he was awarded the Marconi Prize.

12. "WHO ARE YOU, DOCTOR SORGE?"

Oddly enough, the personality of L.I. Kupriyanovich remains one of the most mysterious in the history of domestic electronics to this day. Despite big number publications, almost nothing was known about him.
True, there is one ghostly clue. In Georgy Tushkan’s story “Friends and Enemies of Anatoly Rusakov”, published in 1963, based, allegedly on real events, one of the heroes of the story, Yuri Kubyshkin, creates a pocket radio, which he also calls “radiophone”, model YUK-5 UK-RAF , which again echoes “LK-1”. Kubyshkin also has a car. Wasn’t Leonid Kupriyanovich the prototype of Yuri Kubyshkin? According to Tushkan's story, Yuri Kubyshkin creates radio control systems for rockets, radio devices for rockets and radiosondes. In Moscow there was an organization of just such a profile, then it was called NII-885, or “Institute”, later RNII KP. In 1963, a major reorganization of the institute took place. Of course, the version that naturally suggests itself is that Kupriyanovich could work at NII-885, had a high salary and all the opportunities to create miniature equipment, and left there just in connection with the reorganization of 1963. However, there are no facts yet that directly or indirectly confirm this.

In 2014, the Rossiya channel showed Alexander Evsyukov’s film “Who’s First? Chronicle of Scientific Plagiarism,” which, in particular, talked about Kupriyanovich’s phone: the filmmakers managed to find the inventor’s relatives. Unfortunately, Leonid Ivanovich himself was no longer alive. His wife, Olga Kupriyanovich, and daughter spoke about the inventor.

They reported that Leonid Ivanovich was an enthusiastic, versatile person, but at some point he lost interest in the idea of a radiotelephone; he did not give a reason. Now we can assume, perhaps, the simplest explanation - in the field of medical technology it was easier to defend a dissertation and confirm the implementation of the developed system in practice. An academic degree in the USSR gave an increase in salary and increased the opportunity to get a good position in scientific and design organizations and universities; such a motive for changing occupation would be simple and understandable.

In A. Evsyukov’s film, three samples of Kupriyanovich’s mobile phone designs were shown: the first of them is similar to the device presented in 1958-1959, but without a handset, and two others, photographs of which have not yet been found by the site’s author in other sources. The latter, with the inscription "Moscow", judging by the design, had a microphone and speaker in the case. Was he the same model that was exhibited at VDNKh and was preparing for serial production(the design of the sample is quite industrial) is still unknown.

In 2015, a film was released on the Russia-Culture TV channel called “The Mystery of LK-1.” In this film, the daughter of the inventor, Vera Leonidovna Sokolova (Kupriyanovich), recalls that Leonid Ivanovich for some time continued to personally use one of the created samples of a mobile phone, like a car one. She also mentions that in the 50s, a certain promotional video was shot about Kupriyanovich’s mobile phone, which should have included a fishing episode.

Surprisingly, we managed to find this film. This is part of the almanac "Science and Technology", No. 6 (254), March 1959. Judging by the fact that the almanac shows the height of summer (strawberries are being harvested), the filming took place in 1958. You can download a fragment of a newsreel. The footage and fragment are taken from a publicly available film magazine on the website net-film.ru

At the moment, the footage from this newsreel is so far the only newsreel found that depicts the inventor of the mobile phone himself and thanks to which we can hear his voice. In addition, at this time, this can be considered the world's first documentary film, which shows calls on a mobile phone, and the world's first users of mobile communications. The story shows three calls - one incoming, a woman calling from a city payphone, and two outgoing - from the fifth plantation of the Lenin state farm, where a state farm worker calls the office to send a car for the collected strawberries, and from the river, where a fisherman calls home. It can be assumed that the filming took place somewhere on the territory of the current Lenin State Farm CJSC, located near the Moscow Ring Road.
It is characteristic that the demonstration of a mobile phone in the film and here does not cause a sensation among others. People are surprised that a regular telephone can be called by radio, but they do not perceive this as a historical event. The plot ends with the journalist’s phrase: “We must assume that this invention will find the widest application in the national economy.” By the way, the first story in this issue of Science and Technology is dedicated to computers and the Soviet CNC machine. Computers and mobile phones. Something without which human life is unimaginable at the beginning of the third millennium.

Unfortunately, that's all for now. The memory of one of the people to whom humanity owes mobile telephony has so far been immortalized only by A. Evsyukov’s film and reprints on the Internet. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why statements are now coming from the White House that the Russians supposedly don’t produce anything (“Russia doesn’t make anything”), which is very reminiscent of the words of one historical figure who is now unpopular in Germany that “Russia does not yet have a single plant of its own that could actually make, say, a real living truck.”

12. INSTEAD OF AN EPILOGUE.

30 years after the creation of LK-1, on April 9, 1987, at the KALASTAJATORPPA hotel in Helsinki (Finland), General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee M.S. Gorbachev made a mobile call to the USSR Ministry of Communications in the presence of Nokia Vice President Stefan Widomski.
Thus, the mobile phone has become a means of influencing the minds of politicians - just like the first satellite during the time of Khrushchev. Although, unlike a satellite, a working mobile phone was not actually an indicator of technical superiority - the same Khrushchev was able to call using it...
"Wait!" - the reader will object. "So who should be considered the creator of the first mobile phone - Cooper, Kupriyanovich, Bachvarov?"
It seems that there is no point in contrasting the results of the work here. Economic opportunities for mass use of the new service emerged only in 1990.

It is possible that there were other attempts to create a wearable mobile phone that were ahead of their time, and humanity will someday remember them.

The author expresses sincere gratitude to Dimo Stoyanov and Peter Khinkov for information about the history of mobile communications in Bulgaria, Alexander Aloyan (Orlovskaya Pravda newspaper) and Alexander Evsyukov.

Biography. The first mobile phones Mobile phone LK 1 Kupriyanovich pdf

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Biography. The first mobile phones Mobile phone LK 1 Kupriyanovich pdf

1957

1958

1961

1963

Early 60s

1965

1966

1967

1972

1973

Biography

Bibliography

DOMESTIC MOBILES OF THE 50'S ordinary space age sensation

Popular articles

Latest articles

Sections

Pages

Special projects

Contacts

DOMESTIC MOBILES OF THE 50'S
ordinary space age sensation