I am on the market for a new cell phone so I thought it was the perfect time to do a round on mobile phones! For this first round, I dug deep…veeery deep into the history of mobile phones. I will get closer to the present day phones with subsequent rounds. Enjoy!

1. Which country started testing wireless telephony for their military trains towards the end of World War I? – Germany
2. What year did Bell Labs introduced a mobile service allowing customers to make calls from their automobiles? – 1946
3. Which US company commercialized the Mobile Telephone Service standard in 1949? – AT&T
4. The introduction of the Improved Mobile Telephone Service in 1965 eliminated the need for what component that was vital to many phone services at the time? – Operators
5. What year was the first handheld mobile phone unveiled, kickstarting a communication revolution? – 1973
6. What country was the first to deploy an automatic analogue cellular service to its customers in 1979? – Japan
7. What was the first automatic analogue cellular service system commonly referred to as around the world? – 1G
8. What year were consumers first able to buy a mobile phone, assuming they had a few thousand dollars to spare? – 1983
9. Which company was responsible for introducing the first mobile phone and the first commercially available mobile phone? – Motorola
10. What decade was the first text message sent through a commercially available mobile phone? – 1990s

Image credit: Alfio Mazzei