Where it all began

I remember the very first phone I ever owned; it was a baby blue Nokia 5110. It was beautiful, I treated it like a fragile ornament, I didn’t want to drop it, scratch it or lose it. It meant a lot to me because at the time, it was THE phone to have and I was the first in my group of friends and in my class to have it (only because my mother had passed it on to me when she bought new one) and people were so amazed about the fact that I was so young and I had a phone (I was 13). When I think back to those times, I get the feeling that those types of phones were the first phones to be invented, because when I look at them now they look so ancient. But where really did it all begin?
In 1943 a chemist by the name of Michael Faraday began a research about whether space could conduct electricity. He exposed his advances of the science and technology of those times and his discoveries led to the development of the “cellular phone”.
The first person to communicate through wireless was Mahlon Loomis who developed a method of transmitting and receiving messages by using the earth’s atmosphere and launching kites enclosed with copper screens that were linked to the ground with copper wires. Dr Martin Cooper was the inventor of the first portable handset and the first to make a call using a portable cellular phone.
In spite of the demand, it took cellular phones about 37 years to become commercially accessible. Today there are more than 60 million cell phone owners and the cellular business has grown in the years to being a R30 billion market per year industry. Now, when I look back at how much I treasured my Nokia 5110 (which didn’t even have a colour screen), it makes me realise that every year cell phones advance at a rapid pace. If I see a person carrying a Nokia 5110 (a person who looks like they can afford a better phone) I think to myself “OMG” because it is such an old phone, it even had an aerial for goodness sake.