Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909

Re:Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909 by jacquesm on Tuesday May 04, 2010 @10:09AM (#1318029)

Mobiles yes, but Tesla clearly seems to think (at least according to this article) that there will be no 'intermediaries', that the transmissions are 'station-to-station' (or peer-to-peer as we'd say nowadays) instead of the way the cell phone network actually works, with calls using fixed base stations plugged in to the trunk lines.

Station-to-station would indeed require transmission without loss, and power loss for a transmitter is roughly equivalent to the cube of the distance for an omni-directional antenna.

That doesn't diminish the power of this vision, but even Tesla had to abide by the laws of physics.

One 'Nathan B. Stubblefield' apparently holds a 1908 patent on a wireless telephone: http://www.google.com/patents?q=887357

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Re:Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909 by westbywest on Tuesday May 04, 2010 @11:24AM (#1318271)

Although this article is understandably scant on details, I gather from the blurb "millions of such instruments from a single station," that Tesla did anticipate some sort of transmission stations to relay the traffic of the wireless handsets.

Still, a big difference between this forecast and the present state of mobile wireless is that Tesla probably expected the subscribers' handset to draw power from the microwave transmissions themselves, rather than from batteries.

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Re:Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909 by 10ren on Tuesday May 04, 2010 @11:18AM (#1318245)

The article talks about wireless power transmission, which relates to your point. I think as a mathematically capable physicist, he would be well aware of the inverse cube law (volume of a sphere with distance). I wonder what he was thinking? Perhaps focussed radio, like a laser (raser? It'd still be a laser, just a non-visible frequency)

Also he didn't think of packet radio. But though extremely helpful, I'm not sure that it's absolutely necessary.

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Re:Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909 by dionysiac on Tuesday May 04, 2010 @12:00PM (#1318411)

Masers (microwaves) were actually developed before lasers were, and do work pretty well for power transmission (as these things go - still quite a loss). You have the problem of directionality and tracking, though.

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Re:Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909 by jacquesm on Tuesday May 04, 2010 @12:05PM (#1318433)

And the problem of not frying stuff in between.

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