home Comp. literacy Leonid Kupriyanovich: how a Soviet engineer invented the mobile phone. Mobile phone that was born in the USSR Leonid kupriyanovich mobile

Leonid Kupriyanovich: how a Soviet engineer invented the mobile phone. Mobile phone that was born in the USSR Leonid kupriyanovich mobile

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

April 3, 1973 head of division mobile communications Motorola Martin Cooper, walking through the center of Manhattan, decided to call on his cell phone. The mobile phone was called Dyna-TAC and looked like a brick that weighed over a kilogram and worked in talk mode for only half an hour.

It is believed that up to this point, other mobile telephones that a person can carry with him as 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 as just walking down the street.

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

Hoax? Joke? Propaganda? An attempt to misinform Western electronics manufacturers (this industry was known to be of strategic military importance)? Maybe it's just 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 picture from the Science and Life magazine was called Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich, and it was he who turned out to be the person who made the call on a mobile phone 15 years earlier than Cooper. But before we talk about it, remember that the basic principles of mobile communication have a very, very long history.

Portable VHF transmitter. "Radiofront", 16, 1936

However, the possibility of replacing telephones with such radio installations was already reported to people by the Soviet science fiction “Near Sight”.
“The modern telephone is already archaic. The telephone network is growing literally every day. Can you imagine how cumbersome our underground economy will soon become if we continue to connect each apparatus with a regional station with a special wire? Is this cutting edge technology? Communication on ultrashort waves - radio communication - raises telephone technology to a new, higher level. The underground economy is 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 get a wave in the telephone department, which will be your subscriber number.”
In Dolgushin's novel, a radiotelephone could be carried in a briefcase, but, in fact, it was still the same mobile radio: the disk served only for a fixed tuning to a certain wave. The problem of a call to a wired phone number was not solved, in fact, a mobile phone was opposed to a wired one. It is not surprising that in this form the radiotelephone has not yet solved the problem of communication.
Similar ideas did not leave inventors abroad. In the June issue of Modern Mechanics, the same year, 1939, we can find a brief note that the South California Telephone Company is close to the practical creation of a cordless telephone that can be carried anywhere. Technical details were not disclosed in the note. In any case, we can assume that the intention to create such a phone was.

The next step, already during the Great Patriotic War, was taken by the Soviet scientist and inventor Georgy Ilyich Babat in besieged Leningrad, offering the so-called “monophone” - an automatic radiotelephone operating in the centimeter range of 1000-2000 MHz (now the frequencies 850, 900 are used for the GSM standard). , 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 “watering can” film apparatus,” G. Babat wrote in his article “Monofon” in the journal “Tekhnika-Molodezhi” No. 7-8 for 1943: “Wherever the subscriber is - at home, away or at work, in the foyer of the theater, on the podium of the stadium, watching the competition - everywhere he can turn his individual monophone into one of the many endings of the wave network branches. Several subscribers can connect to one ending, and no matter how many there are, they will not interfere with each other. friend.” Due to the fact that the principles of cellular communication had not yet been invented by that time, Babat suggested using an extensive network of microwave waveguides to connect mobile phones with a base station.

Just a few years later, in 1945, a book by V.I. Nemtsov “Invisible Ways: Notes of a Radio Designer”, which describes the work of a radio designer using the example of creating a mobile phone.
“Speak from the forest, without wires, with any subscriber of the city network - after all, this is almost a fantastic phone in your pocket! True, the phone is 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!”
“Fiction 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 NIIS of the Red Army, where he was engaged in the creation of portable military radio stations, having received more than 20 copyright certificates for inventions. He survived the war and the blockade in Leningrad, where he was engaged in the development of the production of radio stations, then he was sent to Baku as a chief engineer at a radio plant under construction. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star. And who better than him to 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 interfacing with the city telephone network, describes in detail the procedure for checking the operation of a mobile phone both with a city network with manual switches and with an automatic telephone exchange. Details are noted that, it would seem, are not needed either for the popularization of scientific knowledge or for a work of art; for example, it is mentioned that the girl on the switchboard, after a series of test calls, marked Nemtsov's phone number as idle, 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: did Nemtsov describe the real work on the creation of a mobile phone? And didn't he make the first historic call back in 1945? I must say that at that time Nemtsov had a completely objective reason to hide such experiments: it was allowed to resume amateur work on the air in the USSR 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 reduction in weight and dimensions for pre-production samples. Recall 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 then batteries 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 (a substitute for grounding), without which the communication range was reduced to two kilometers. To create a mobile communication network, Nemtsov proposed to use millimeter waves in the future, with the base station antenna suspended on a balloon.
In any case, Nemtsov's book prompted domestic radio amateurs and designers to try to create a mobile phone.

In December 1947, Bell employees Douglas Ring and Ray Young proposed the principle of hexagonal cells for mobile telephony. This happened just in the midst of active attempts to create a phone with which you can make calls from the car. The first such service was launched in 1946 in St. Louis by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1947 a system with intermediate stations along the highway was launched, allowing you to call from a car on the way from New York to Boston. However, due to imperfection and high cost, these systems were not commercially successful. In 1948, another American telephone company in Richmond managed to set up a car radio telephone service with automatic dialing, which was already better. The weight of the equipment of such systems was tens of kilograms and it was placed in the trunk, so an inexperienced person did not have a thought about a pocket version of looking 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. Power was from a car battery.
The telephone number assigned to the car was connected to the radio receiver installed at the city telephone exchange. To call a city subscriber, it was necessary to turn on the device in the car, which sent its call signs on the air. They were perceived by the base station at the city PBX and immediately turned on the telephone, which worked like a regular phone. When calling a car, the city subscriber dialed the number, this activated the base station, the signal of which was perceived by the device on the car.

It was expected that the telephone system Shapiro and Zakharchenko will be widely used in the work of fire brigades, air defense units, police, emergency medical and technical assistance. However, further information about the development of the system did not appear. It can be assumed that it was considered more expedient for the emergency services to use their departmental communication systems than to use the GTS.

In the United States, Alfred Gross was the first to attempt the impossible. Since 1939, he has been fond of creating portable radios, which decades later were called “walkie talkies”. In 1949, he created a device based on a walkie-talkie, which was called "wireless remote telephone". The device could be carried with you, and he 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 the telephone companies showed no interest in this novelty, as well as in his other ideas in this direction. So America lost the chance to be the birthplace of the first practical mobile phone.

Pocket radio Kupriyanovich 1955

However, these ideas were developed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USSR. So, one of those who continued to 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 work was sparingly characterized by the press as a "radio engineer" or "radio amateur". It is also known that Kupriyanovich could be considered a successful person at that time - in the early 60s he had a car.

The consonance of the names of Kupriyanovich and Cooper is only the initial link in the chain of strange coincidences in the fate of these personalities. 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 station he created in 1955 weighed as much as the first transistor walkie talkies of the early 60s.

1957 - walkie-talkie with a matchbox

In 1957, Kupriyanovich demonstrates an even more amazing thing - a walkie-talkie the size of a matchbox and weighing only 50 grams (together with power supplies), which can work without changing power for 50 hours and provides communication at a distance of two kilometers - quite a match for the products of the 21st century, which can be seen in the windows of the current communications salons (picture from the magazine YUT, 3, 1957). As evidenced by the publication in UT, 12, 1957, mercury or manganese batteries were used in this radio station.

At the same time, Kupriyanovich not only managed 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 a promising title - “Pocket Radio Stations”.

Handheld radio of Kupriyanovich

The 1960 edition describes a simple three-transistor radio that can be worn on the arm, much like the famous watch walkie-talkie from the movie Dead Season. The author offered it for tourists and mushroom pickers to repeat, but in life, students showed interest in this construction of Kupriyanovich mainly - for tips on exams, which even entered the episode of Gaidai's comedy film "Operation Y".

And, just like Cooper, pocket walkie-talkies led Kupriyanovich to make such a radiotelephone from which one could call any city telephone, and which one could take with you anywhere. The pessimistic mood of foreign firms could not stop a man who knew how to make walkie-talkies from a matchbox.

3. THE IMPOSSIBLE BECOME POSSIBLE.

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 ATP - automatic telephone radio station), which received signals from mobile phones to a wired network and transmitted from a wired network to mobile phones. 50 years ago, the principles of operation of a mobile phone were described simply and figuratively for inexperienced cleaners: regular phone, only we control its work at a distance.”
For the operation of 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 receiver for a telephone. But it turns out that this is not so.

“The question involuntarily arises: will several simultaneously operating LK-1 interfere with each other?” - writes all the same "Science and Life". “No, since in this case different tonal frequencies are used for the device, forcing their relays to operate on the ATR (tonal frequencies will be transmitted on the same wave). The frequencies of transmission and reception of sound for each device will be different 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 apparatus is ... several tens of kilometers,” writes Leonid Kupriyanovich in a note for the July issue of the magazine “Young Technician” in 1957. “If there is only one receiving device within these limits, this will be enough to talk with any of the inhabitants of the city who has a telephone, and for as many kilometers as you like.” “Radiotelephones … can be used on vehicles, aircraft and ships. Passengers will be able to call home, work, book a hotel room directly from the aircraft. It will find application among tourists, builders, hunters, etc.”

In addition, Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would also 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 proposed to introduce mobile phones in two stages. “In the beginning, while there are few radio telephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near home phone car enthusiast. But later, when there will be thousands of such devices, the 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, which makes its relay work.” Thus, Kupriyanovich essentially positioned two types of household appliances at once - simple radio tubes, 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 more than half a century ago imagined how widely the mobile phone would enter our daily life.
“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 need to dial the known number of your radiophone from any city phone (even from 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, bus, call “ ambulance”, a fire or emergency vehicle, contact the house ...”
It is hard to believe that these words were written by a person who has not been in the 21st century. However, for Kupriyanovich there was no need to travel to the future. He built it.

In 1958, at the request of radio amateurs, Kupryanovich published in the February issue of the magazine "Young Technician" a simplified design of the device, the ATR of which can work with only 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 the subscriber, it was necessary, in addition to the receiver, to turn on the transmitter on the “handset”. Hearing a long telephone beep in the earpiece and making the appropriate switches, one could proceed to dialing. But still, it was more convenient than on the radio stations of that time, since it was not necessary to switch from reception to transmission and end 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 youth magazine, Kupriyanovich was not afraid of competition. By this time he is ready new model apparatus, which at that time can be considered revolutionary.

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

The mobile phone model of 1958, together with the power supply, weighed only 500 grams.

According to L.I. Kupriyanovich in his article published in the February issue of the magazine "Tekhnika-molodezhi" for 1959, now up to a thousand channels of communication of radiophones with the Asia-Pacific Region could now be placed on one wave. To do this, the coding of the number in the radiophone was carried out in a pulsed way, and during a conversation, the signal was compressed using a device that the author of the radiophone called a correlator. As described in the same article, the correlator was based on the principle of a vocoder - the division of a speech signal into several frequency ranges, compression of each range and subsequent restoration at the receiving point. True, the recognition of the voice should have deteriorated, but with the quality of the then wired communication, this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing the ATP on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees installed a base station fifteen years later 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 be widely used in transport, in the city telephone network, in industry, at construction sites, etc.” Kupriyanovich writes in the journal Science and Life in August 1957. But the biggest sensation was yet to come.

5. PDA FOR GAGARIN'S FLIGHT.

In 1961 L.I. Kupriyanovich demonstrates to APN reporters Yury Rybchinsky and Yu. Shcherbakov ... a pocket mobile phone.

Seeing this device, the modern reader will surely exclaim “It can’t be!” Indeed, to create a telephone in 1961 with the dimensions 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 solid organization whose task is to convey information about the USSR to foreign media. Here there can be no unverified facts threatening revelations and scandals.
I suppose the reader has already come to his senses after the sight of the Soviet handheld, and can easily perceive other data of the device. Kupriyanovich brought the weight of the mobile phone to only 70 grams. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, not all mobile phones can boast of this. True, the PDA of 1961 has a minimum of functions, there is no display and the dialer is small - apparently, you will have to turn it with a pencil. But there is no better anywhere in the world yet, and there will not be for a long time. According to Rybchinsky's description, this apparatus of Kupriyanovich 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 finally, we come to the climax. APN correspondents reported that the presented mobile phone is "the latest model of a new device, prepared for mass production at one of the Soviet enterprises."
That's exactly what it says - "prepared for serial production." The fact that the plant is not indicated is not surprising at that time. There were times when the manufacturer of consumer electronics was not indicated even in the instruction manual.
“Already now, many experts consider the new means of communication a serious rival to the conventional telephone.” – APN correspondent informed the readers. – “Transport, industrial and agricultural enterprises, exploration parties, construction - this is not a complete list of possible areas of application for telephone communication without wires. In order to serve a city like Moscow with radiophony, only ten automatic telephone radio stations are needed. The first of these stations is 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 with a range of 200 kilometers.

And then there was silence. At the moment, this is the last publication known to the author of the page about the Kupriyanovich radio background, plans for its production and infrastructure construction. It is also strange that the publication of the correspondents of the international news agency surfaced only in the regional newspaper Orlovskaya Pravda (12, 1961). In the central editions of the sensational handheld - not a word. 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 YUT for 1960, Kupriyanovich publishes a description of a radio station with an automatic call and a range of 40-50 km, in the January issue of Techniques for Youth for 1961, a popular article on microelectronics technologies “A radio receiver under a microscope”. In the November issue of "TM" - another article: "Europe looks at Red Square." All this, of course, is necessary and relevant, but what about the world achievement of our conscientious science?

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

6. “I HAVE VAGUED DOUBTS.”

Did Kupriyanovich himself have any motives to show how to create and show journalists over the course of the whole five years as many as three different non-working devices - for example, in order to achieve success or recognition? In the publications of the 50s, the place of work of the inventor 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 degree of candidate of technical sciences, later he worked at the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR and in the early 60s had a car (for which, by the way, he himself created a radiotelephone and anti-theft radio alarm) . In other words, by Soviet standards, he was a very successful person. Two of Kupriyanovich's inventions were patented in the USA in the 1970s. Doubters can also check out a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including one adapted for young technicians, the LK-1.
Let's look at the question from the other side. Maybe at that time in the same USA there were many similar amateur designs? Let's open the February 1958 issue of Modern Mechanics with an article by J.R. Pierce, Director of Telecommunications Research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, titled "Telephones of Tomorrow." Who better than him to know about it.
“Does this (the advent of pocket pagers - O.I.) convince us of the possibility of a telephone in every car, or maybe even in every pocket?” Pierce writes. “Technically, it will be possible soon. We can build a miniaturized transistorized receiver that can operate 24 hours a day without significantly draining a 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 not be absurd either.”
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 USA. He just thinks the idea is not crazy. Of course in the future.
Do not think that the Americans did not dream of such a phone at all. In September 1956, the same magazine publishes an exciting article, "Your Telephone of Tomorrow." About how one night in the future on the Market Street in San Francisco, a young man calls his friend in Rome on a mobile phone. From video. With 3-D video. In the America of the future, every baby will be given a phone number from birth. If a person is not reached by phone, then he is dead. Here is such an optimistic forecast.

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

Doubters can also check out a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including one adapted for young technicians, the LK-1. This is what they did, for example, in 1959 at the Arkhangelsk Electrical College of Communications, sophomore student Nikolai Sulakov, Vyacheslav Krotov and others under the guidance of the teacher of the technical school Konstantin Petrovich Gashchenko. After reading in the magazine "Young Technician" about the inventions of Kupriyanovich, they created their own simplified version of the radiotelephone (radio tube), which operated in the 38 MHz band. True, it was more difficult with the details (for example, a thermal relay had to be installed in the end circuit). Later, a portable apparatus was created, which Sulakov turned out to weigh 2 kilograms with batteries, the tuning stability and range were inferior to Kupriyanovich's apparatus, but for a student's design it was not so bad. As a base station, Sulakov used the 12-RP army radio 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 an award for participating in the exhibition of communication technical schools in Odessa and was able to transfer to the radio department.

So, there is no doubt that the radiophone existed, worked, there were decisions in some form on 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. A WAY AND FAR AND LONG ...

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

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

First of all, bureaucratic obstacles to cellular communication existed both in the USSR and in the USA. It took the FCC 21 years to officially allow the widespread use of cell phones by civilians. On the other hand, in the USSR, the issues of the use of radio communications by civilians were rather quickly resolved, if it was not personal, but official use. In the 1960s, the USSR launched the Altai nationwide automotive communication service, which was quite good for that time. Then maybe bureaucratic thoughtlessness is to blame? Say, the officials did not appreciate the merits of cellular communications and did not move forward. Moreover, one of the authoritative experts said: “Cell phones have no future, while communication in cars is already used today” ... Stop. But these words were sounded not in 1959, but in 1973, not in the USSR, but in the USA, and this was stated by the private company Bell. Moreover, based on motives familiar from Soviet production films, the company promoted an automobile 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 who wanted to acquire an expensive novelty were forced to sign up in the queue for 5-10 years in advance. It was possible to correct the situation only in 1983, moreover, in a purely Soviet way - “through pull”. Motorola founder Paul Galvin, using his personal connections and acquaintance with US Vice President George W. Bush, was able to get him to meet 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 in the literal sense was decided by a call from above.

"Altai" from the very beginning had specific customers, on which the allocation of funds depended. In addition, the main problem in the implementation of both projects was not at all in creating a portable device, but in the need for significant investments and time in creating the communication infrastructure and its debugging and the cost of maintaining it. During the deployment of "Altai", for example, in Kyiv, the output lamps of transmitters failed, in Tashkent there were problems due to poor-quality installation of base station equipment. As the 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 communication in the early 60s in any country would have been a rather expensive service that only a small part of the population could afford. A potential customer - a major Western businessman or a Soviet leader - did not at all 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, where you could not think about the dimensions and weight of the equipment. From this point of view, "Altai" corresponded well to the then demand. Eight transmitters served up to 500-800 subscribers, and the transmission quality was comparable only to digital communication. The implementation of this project looked more realistic than the deployment of a national cellular network based on Radiophone.

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

8. UNDER THE BALKAN STARS.

In the early 1960s, the echo of publications about Kupriyanovich's radio background had not subsided yet. So, in the book of K.K. Boboshko “It is interesting to know” the 1958 model is mentioned. 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, the device was described in a plastic case smaller than it was in the picture of 1958 - 110 * 80 * 30 mm, although heavier - 700 grams, made entirely on transistors. Instead of a handset (according to the textual description), the device used a piezoelectric speaker, which simultaneously served as a loudspeaker; nickel-cadmium batteries were used for power, the range of the apparatus was 80 km.

It was also reported that the radiophone will find wide application 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, the desire to become the pioneers of mobile communications in Bulgaria was not limited to children. In 1959, engineer Khristo 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.

According to the Bulgarian magazine "E-vestik.bg", 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 he exhibited a mobile phone in the USSR at an exhibition in Moscow, was shown to cosmonauts A. Leonov, N. Rukavishnikov and P. Belyaev, “but for serial production it required American and Japanese transistors”, the use of which, according to Bachvarov, it was not agreed. According to unverified data, Bachvarov's experimental sample had two communication channels, operated in the 60-70 MHz frequency range and was used as a demonstrator; the second sample of the device was handed over to the head of state T. Zhivkov for promotion purposes. That is, Bachvarov's prototype consisted of two long-range radio tubes. It is sometimes stated in publications that Bachvarov in 1959 allegedly invented “the essence of today's jiesem”, which is not true, because. The specification for the GSM standard has been developed since 1982 and was published in 1992.

Later, the first industrial samples of a mobile phone were created in Bulgaria. Already at the exhibition "Inforga-65" 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 have chosen a different path," wrote engineers Y. Popov and Y. Pukhnachev in their article "Inforga-65" published in the journal "Science and Life" number 8 for 1965. “To implement wireless communication, they used a system developed several years ago by a Soviet inventor, engineer L. Kupriyanovich. A special set-top box serving 15 radiotelephones is connected to the city telephone network. During a conversation, its antenna picks up information from the radiotelephones and sends it to the telephone network. Transistor radiotelephones provide reliable two-way radio communications.”
So, the journal "Science and Life" called the father of the Bulgarian mobile communications not Bachvarov, but Kupriyanovich. At a minimum, this means that the groundwork created by L.I. Kupriyanovich. The apparatus of the company "Radioelectronics" had dimensions larger than the apparatus of Kupriyanovich, demonstrated in 1961; this is not at all surprising, because restrictions on the transfer of technology abroad, including to Eastern European countries, could play 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 “radio communication on the VHF band with any telephone subscriber of the city, region and enterprise without special device for his telephone. As you can see in the picture, this mobile phone already resembled a modern one (with the exception, of course, of a dialer), easily fit in the hand and generally fit the description of 1964. The devices were assembled on transistors and could be included in any automatic telephone exchange using the RATC-10 base station.

Initially, six mobile phones could work simultaneously through one base station. This, of course, is less than the first Motorola base station, where there were 30 subscribers, but in 1966 Motorola was still only engaged in the first walkie-talkies. The limitation of the number of subscribers to six was due to the number distribution system: emergency numbers started from one, city numbers from zero, internal departmental numbers from nine, and one number had to be assigned to the base station operator; thus, without installing an additional switchboard, six numbers remained 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, with two switches, or the selection was automatic under the action of a frequency-modulated signal in the channel. The base station continuously transmitted a multi-tone tone code on each channel. The mobile phone had several narrow-band filters for detecting tones after the demodulator, DIP switches for selecting “own” tones and comparators for 8 or 12 bits from the 74th series. If the channel had “its own” tone code, then the mobile phone was receiving and transmitting in this channel. If there was no “own” tone code, the mobile phone switched transmission to the “common/service” channel, and the receiving channel began searching for its own code sequentially through all channels. Channel switching of channels was carried out until its own code appeared at the output of the demodulator.

The speech signal was amplitude modulation, in connection with which the selection signal was perceived as a significant background noise. Sometimes external noise that got through the microphone in the channel led to spontaneous channel switching. Later, timers began to be used 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, power grids, chemical plants, especially since this system provided for a conference call mode. The RATC series devices were produced and improved until the 80s inclusive. At the Sofia-Vostok TPP, the equipment was dismantled and replaced with more modern equipment 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 communication system (“national system for radio communication”). Unfortunately, after the death in 1977, Prof. Bradistilov's work was halted for 10 years.

9. WHAT IS THE WEST?

Western European countries also made attempts to create mobile communications before the “historic Cooper call”. Barely a year after Bulgaria showed off its mobile phones in Moscow, the November issue of Science & Mechanics magazine featured the so-called Carry Phone as a new service. True, in terms of dimensions and weight, the novelty of Western technology was clearly inferior to the novelties of the East. Yes, and convenience too.

The mobile phone was created by the American company Carry Phone Co. from Studio City, California and was offered for sale at a price of $3,000 or for rent at $50 per call. The advertisement did not mention the range, but said that it could be taken on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago.

Carry Phone was a briefcase-diplomat with a handset inside, weighing 4.5 kg. With an incoming call, short rings were heard inside the suitcase, and to answer it was necessary to open the suitcase. In order to make an outgoing call, one had to select one of the 11 free channels using the buttons. After the operator answered, it was necessary 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 functions, it was a certain step backward compared even with the Kupriyanovich apparatus of 1957. However, such a 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, the state policy regarding such an infrastructure was not defined, and investments in this market segment went precisely into the development of a car radiotelephone, such an approach could be considered reasonable. Later in the US, similar devices called "attache' phones" (portfolio phones) developed as a segment of the automotive communications market. In particular, they were produced by the American firms Livermore, General Communication Systems, Integrated Systems Technology. “In business, or on vacation, your portable phone always at hand,” the advertisement said. By the way, at that time in the United States a mobile phone was called a phone installed just in a car, as in the Soviet Altai system. Most of these phones, released then in the United States, worked with the MTS network, some models had modifications for IMTS / MTS networks. This model of mobile telephony service lasted in the US until the early 80s, until it began to experience competition from new generation cellular networks.

April 11, 1972, i.e. one year ahead of Cooper's call, British firm 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 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 the hands. The phone operated in the range of 450-470 MHz, according to 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 created with semi-automatic switching of subscribers. The digits of the dialed number were displayed on the decatrons at the base station, after which the telephone operator manually switched. There is no exact data on why such a strange dialing system was adopted at the moment, we can only assume that the possible reason was errors in transmitting the number that the telephone operator eliminated.

10. THERE, AROUND THE TURN.

But back to the fate of Kupriyanovich. In the 60s, he moved away from the creation of 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 Memory Improvement Reserves. Cybernetic Aspects”, which, in particular, considers the problems of “recording” information into the subconscious during a special “sleep at the information level”. To put a person into the state of such a dream, Kupriyanovich creates the “Ritmoson” device and puts forward the idea of a new service - mass teaching people in their sleep by phone, and the biocurrents of people control the sleep devices through the central computer.
But this idea of Kupriyanovich remains unrealized, and in his book Biological Rhythms and Sleep, published in 1973, the Ritmoson device is mainly positioned as a device for correcting sleep disorders.
The reasons, perhaps, should be sought in the phrase from the “Memory Improvement Reserves”: “The task of improving memory is to solve the problem of controlling the consciousness, and through it, to a large extent, the subconscious.” At the informational level, a person in a state of sleep can, in principle, memorize not only foreign words for memorization, but also advertising slogans, background information designed for unconscious perception, and a person is not able to control this process, and may not even remember whether he is in such a state of sleep. There are too many moral and ethical problems here, and the current human society is clearly not ready for the mass application of such technologies.
Solutions in this area proposed by Kupriyanovich were protected by patents, as in the USSR (author's certificates 500802, 506420, 1258420, 1450829, US patent 4289121, Canadian patent 1128136). The last copyright certificate was claimed in 1987.

Other mobile communication pioneers also changed the subject of work.

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.

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

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

Martin Cooper led a small private company, ArrayComm, to market its own technology for fast wireless Internet. For the fortieth anniversary of the demonstration of his model, he was awarded the Marconi Prize.

11. INSTEAD OF THE EPILOGUE.

Thirty 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.
So the mobile phone became a means of influencing the minds of politicians - just like the first satellite in the Khrushchev era. Although, unlike the satellite, the operating mobile phone was not really an indicator of technical superiority - the same Khrushchev had the opportunity to call on it ...
“Wait!” the reader will object. "So who should be considered the creator of the first mobile phone - Cooper, Kupriyanovich, Bachvarov?"
It seems that it makes no sense to oppose the results of the work here. Economic opportunities for the mass use of the new service were formed only by 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.

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

DOMESTIC MOBILE PHONES OF THE 50'S
space age sensation

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

On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, head of Motorola's mobile communications division, was walking through midtown Manhattan and decided to call on his cell phone. The mobile phone was called Dyna-TAC and looked like a brick that weighed over a kilogram and worked in talk mode for only half an hour.

Prior to this, the son of the founder of Motorola, Robert Gelvin, who in those days served as the executive director of this company, allocated $ 15 million and gave his subordinates a period of 10 years to create a device that the user can carry with him. The first working sample appeared in just a couple of months. The success of Martin Cooper, who came to the company in 1954 as an ordinary engineer, was facilitated by the fact that since 1967 he has been developing portable radios. It was they who led to the idea of a mobile phone.

It is believed that until this moment there were no other mobile telephones that a person can 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 as just walking down the street.

Moreover, until the early 1960s, many companies refused to conduct research into the creation of cellular communications at all, because they came to the conclusion that, in principle, it was impossible to create a compact cellular telephone. And none of the specialists of these companies paid attention to the fact that on the other side of the "iron curtain" photographs began to appear in popular science magazines, which depicted ... a man talking on a mobile phone. (For those who doubt, the numbers of the magazines where the pictures are published will be given, so that everyone can make sure that this is not a graphic editor).

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

Portable VHF transmitter. "Radiofront", 16, 1936

Actually, attempts to give the phone mobility appeared soon after the appearance. Field telephones were created with coils for quick laying of the line, attempts were made to quickly provide communication from the car, throwing wires on a line running along the highway or connecting to a socket on a pole. Of all this, only field phones have found relatively widespread use (at one of the mosaics of the Kyiv metro station in Moscow, modern passengers sometimes mistake a field phone for a mobile phone and a laptop).
It was not very convenient to look for an outlet, so the idea of a mobile wireless phone appears somewhere at the very beginning of the 20th century. Thus, the American newspaper Salt Lake Telegram, citing the Associated Press, March 3, 1919, reports that Godfrey C. Isaacs, managing director of the Marconi company, said that the experiments carried out make it possible to believe in the idea of a wireless pocket phone as an everyday thing. "So, a person walking down the street can hear a phone call in his pocket, and putting the receiver to his ear, he will hear the voice of another, someone who may be flying in an airplane at a speed of hundreds of kilometers per hour from Warsaw to London."
However, it became possible to provide true mobility of telephone communication only after the advent of radio communications in the VHF band. By the 30s, transmitters appeared that a person could easily carry on his back or hold in his hands - in particular, they were used by the American NBC radio company for operational reporting from the scene. Connections with automatic telephone exchanges have not yet been provided by such means of communication.

However, the possibility of replacing phones with such radio installations was already reported to people by the Soviet science fiction "Near Sight".
"- The modern telephone is already archaic. The telephone network is growing literally every day. Can you imagine how cumbersome our underground economy will soon become if we continue to connect each device with a regional station with a special wire? Is this advanced technology? Communication on ultrashort waves - radio communication - raises telephone technology to a new, higher level. Underground economy is 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 device and receive a wave in the telephone control, which will be your subscriber number."
In Dolgushin's novel, a radiotelephone could be carried in a briefcase, but, in fact, it was still the same mobile radio: the disk served only for a fixed tuning to a certain wave. The problem of a call to a wired phone number was not solved, in fact, a mobile phone was opposed to a wired one. It is not surprising that in this form the radiotelephone has not yet solved the problem of communication.
Similar ideas did not leave inventors abroad. In the June 1939 issue of Modern Mechanics, we can find a brief note that the South California Telephone Company is close to the practical creation of a cordless telephone that can be carried anywhere. Technical details were not disclosed in the note. In any case, we can assume that the intention to create such a phone was.
The next step, already during the Great Patriotic War, was taken by the Soviet scientist and inventor Georgy Ilyich Babat in besieged Leningrad, offering the so-called "monophone" - an automatic radiotelephone operating in the centimeter range of 1000-2000 MHz (now the frequencies 850, 900 are used for the GSM standard). , 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 film apparatus "watering can"" - G. Babat wrote in his article "Monophone" in the magazine "Technique-Youth" No. 7-8 for 1943: "Wherever the subscriber is - at home, away or at work, in the foyer of the theater, on the podium of the stadium, watching the competition - everywhere he can turn on his individual monophone in one of the many endings of the wave network branches.Several subscribers can connect to one ending, and no matter how many there are, they will not interfere with each other friend." Due to the fact that the principles of cellular communication had not yet been invented by that time, Babat proposed using an extensive network of microwave waveguides to connect mobile phones with a base station.

Just a few years later, in 1945, a book by V.I. Nemtsov "Invisible Ways: Notes of a Radio Designer", which describes the work of a radio designer using the example of creating a mobile phone.
"To speak from the forest, without wires, with any subscriber of the city network - after all, this is almost a fantastic phone in your pocket! True, a phone of 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!"
"Fiction 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 NIIS of the Red Army, where he was engaged in the creation of portable military radio stations, having received more than 20 copyright certificates for inventions. He survived the war and the blockade in Leningrad, where he was engaged in the development of the production of radio stations, then he was sent to Baku as a chief engineer at a radio plant under construction. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star. And who better than him to 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 interfacing with the city telephone network, describes in detail the procedure for checking the operation of a mobile phone both with a city network with manual switches and with an automatic telephone exchange. Details are noted that, it would seem, are not needed either for the popularization of scientific knowledge or for a work of art; for example, it is mentioned that the girl on the switchboard, after a series of test calls, marked Nemtsov's phone number as idle, 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: did Nemtsov describe the real work on the creation of a mobile phone? And didn't he make the first historic call back in 1945? I must say that at that time Nemtsov had a completely objective reason to hide such experiments: it was allowed to resume amateur work on the air in the USSR 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 reduction in weight and dimensions for pre-production samples. Recall 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 then batteries 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 (a substitute for grounding), without which the communication range was reduced to two kilometers. To create a mobile communication network, Nemtsov proposed to use millimeter waves in the future, with the base station antenna suspended on a balloon.
In any case, Nemtsov's book prompted domestic radio amateurs and designers to try to create a mobile phone.

Independently of Nemtsov, the idea of a telephone radio extension was implemented in the United States by 23-year-old radio amateur Carl Mac Brainard, as reported by Popular Mechanics magazine in June 1946 in an article with the catchy headline "Alladin was a Piker", p. 108-111, 240. True, Brainard failed to create a wearable device with a long range, and he found a simple way out: he placed a repeater in his car. At the same time, the wearable part of Reynard's mobile phone was a small box that was attached to a golf bag. The 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 negligible ("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 a separate channel was used for dialing transmission (it is indicated that a "small transmitter in the car" is used to transmit dialing signals). In fact, Brainard's design is primarily interesting as an attempt to circumvent the problems associated with the weight of a wearable device by using the phone in the car as a repeater. Karl Brainard came to the idea of his future apparatus as 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 enterprise, served in the navy. The color-musical installation created by him on discharge lamps commercialized, and he even received a $130,000 contract to build similar jukebox machines. At the same time, the mobile radio extender he created was never 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 answer the phone in the car, or carry a small pager with him, rather than a heavy suitcase.

In December 1947, Bell employees Douglas Ring and Ray Young proposed the principle of hexagonal cells for mobile telephony. This happened just in the midst of active attempts to create a phone with which you can make calls from the car. The first such service was launched in 1946 in St. Louis by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1947 a system with intermediate stations along the highway was launched, allowing you to call from a car on the way from New York to Boston. However, due to imperfection and high cost, these systems were not commercially successful. In 1948, another American telephone company in Richmond managed to set up a car radio telephone service with automatic dialing, which was already better. The weight of the equipment of such systems was tens of kilograms and it was placed in the trunk, so an inexperienced person did not have a thought about a pocket version of looking 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 system from a moving car with a city network, the mobile device of which had a capacity of only 1 watt and fit under the instrument panel. Power was from a car battery.
The telephone number assigned to the car was connected to the radio receiver installed at the city telephone exchange. To call a city subscriber, it was necessary to turn on the device in the car, which sent its call signs on the air. They were perceived by the base station at the city PBX and immediately turned on the telephone, which worked like a regular phone. When calling a car, the city subscriber dialed the number, this activated the base station, the signal of which was perceived by the device on the car.

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

It was expected that the telephone system Shapiro and Zakharchenko will be widely used in the work of fire brigades, air defense units, police, emergency medical and technical assistance. However, further information about the development of the system did not appear. It can be assumed that it was considered more expedient for the emergency services to use their departmental communication systems than to use the GTS.

In the United States, Alfred Gross was the first to attempt the impossible. Since 1939, he has been fond of creating portable radios, which decades later were called "walkie talkies". In 1949, he created a device based on a portable radio, which he called the "wireless remote telephone." The device could be carried with you, and he 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 the telephone companies showed no interest in this novelty, as well as in his other ideas in this direction. So America lost the chance to be the birthplace of the first practical mobile phone.

L.I. Kupriyanovich at work. "Change", 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 to search in the field of mobile communications in our country was Leonid Kupriyanovich. He was born on July 14, 1929, in 1953 he graduated from the Bauman Moscow State Technical University with a degree in Radio Electronics of the Instrument Engineering Faculty. According to journalist A. Osipov ("Pocket Radio Station", Zh-l "Smena", No. 5, 1955, p. 24), while still a student at Moscow Higher Technical School, he designed a portable radio weighing about 2 kilograms, which fit in a field bag. At that time, this was considered a successful design; such radio stations could be seen at the All-Union Exhibition of Amateur Radio Designers. But Kupriyanovich did not like it. According to the same youth magazine "Change", Leonid Ivanovich was fond of mountaineering and even was an athlete - a discharger. When climbing, radio communication with the base, with comrades is vital; but every gram of equipment takes away strength from a person who conquers the peak at the limit of physical capabilities. A walkie-talkie in a bag is no good! You need a small device that can be carried in your pocket and held with one hand.

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

And Kupriyanovich, already being an engineer, again gets to work. As a member of the central radio club of DOSAAF, he could create and test such devices on his own initiative - radiosport is 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 radio won a diploma of the first degree. 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 than two matchboxes in size. Unusually for contemporaries, the low voltage of the radio is only 15-18 volts. At the 12th All-Union Exhibition of Radio Amateurs in Leningrad, the radio station received a diploma of the first degree, and, as they write in No. 24 of the Smena magazine for 1955, "transferred for mass production." According to the article by N. Kazansky "Shortwave and ultrashortwave equipment" in the journal "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 on 0.6P2B lamps, 2P1P and 1P3B lamps, operates in the 38-40 MHz range, has a microphone and a miniature earpiece built into the case, and has a radius of 1 km. Motorola's 1955 products 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 was working at the institute from among the "boxes". At that time, the status of a "box" was common for enterprises in the radio-electronic industry, whole 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 machine builders" 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 with a matchbox

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

Handheld radio of Kupriyanovich

The 1960 edition describes a simple three-transistor radio that can be worn on the arm, much like the famous watch walkie-talkie from Dead Season. The author offered it for tourists and mushroom pickers to repeat, but in life, students showed interest in this design of Kupriyanovich mainly - for tips on exams, which even entered the episode of Gaidai's comedy film "Operation Y".

In 1957 L.I. Kupriyanovich received a copyright certificate for "Radiofon" - 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 Radiophone transmitter. By that time, the first operating set of equipment was also ready, demonstrating the principle of operation of the "Radiophone", named by the inventor of LK-1 (Leonid Kupriyanovich, the first sample).
LK-1, by our standards, was still difficult to call a mobile phone, but it made a great impression on contemporaries. "The telephone apparatus 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 apparatus; their period of continuous use is 20-30 hours. LK-1 has 4 special radio tubes, so that the power given off by the antenna is sufficient for short-wave communication in rodels of 20-30 kilometers. There are 2 antennas on the apparatus; its front panel has 4 call switches, a microphone (outside of which headphones are connected) and a dialing dial.

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 ATP - automatic telephone radio station), which received signals from mobile phones to a wired network and transmitted from a wired network to mobile phones. 50 years ago, the operating principles of a mobile phone were described simply and figuratively for inexperienced cleaners: "Connecting the ATP to any subscriber is the same as with a regular phone, only we control its operation at a distance."
For the operation of 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 receiver for a telephone. But it turns out that this is not so.
"The question involuntarily arises: will several simultaneously operating LK-1s interfere with each other?" - writes all the same "Science and Life". "No, since in this case different tonal frequencies are used for the device, which cause their relays to operate on the ATP (the tonal frequencies will be transmitted on the same wave). The frequencies for transmitting and receiving sound for each device will be different in order to avoid their mutual influence."

Thus, LK-1 had number coding in the telephone itself, and not depending on the wired line, which allows it to be considered with good reason as the first mobile phone. True, judging by the description, this coding was very primitive, and the number of subscribers who could work through one ATP turned out to be very limited at first. In addition, in the first demonstrator, the ATP was simply connected to a regular telephone in parallel with the existing subscriber point - this made it possible to start experiments without making changes to the city exchange, but made it difficult to simultaneously "go to the city" from several handsets. However, in 1957, LK-1 still 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 ... several tens of kilometers," writes Leonid Kupriyanovich in a note for the July issue of the magazine "Young Technician" in 1957. "If there is only one receiving device within these limits, this will be enough to talk with any of the inhabitants of the city who has a telephone, and for as many kilometers as you like." "Radiotelephones ... can be used on vehicles, on airplanes and ships. Passengers can call home, work, book a hotel room directly from the aircraft. It will be used by tourists, builders, hunters, etc."

In addition, Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would also be able to displace phones built into cars. At the same time, the young inventor immediately used something like a "hands free" headset, i. a speakerphone was used instead of an earpiece. In an interview with M. Melgunova, published in the magazine "Behind the Wheel", 12, 1957, Kupriyanovich suggested introducing mobile phones in two stages. “At first, while there are few radio telephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near the car enthusiast’s home telephone. But later, when there are thousands of such devices, the ATP will no longer work for one radio telephone, 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, which makes its relay work." Thus, Kupriyanovich essentially positioned two types of household appliances at once - simple radio tubes, 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 more than half a century ago imagined how widely the mobile phone would enter our daily life.
"Taking such a radiophone with you, you take, in essence, 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 need to dial the known number of your radiophone from any city phone (even from a pay phone). You have a phone call in your pocket and you start a conversation. If necessary you can dial any city telephone number directly from a tram, trolleybus, bus, call an ambulance, fire or emergency vehicle, contact the house ... "
It is hard to believe that these words were written by a person who has not been in the 21st century. However, for Kupriyanovich there was no need to travel to the future. He built it.

In 1958, at the request of radio amateurs, Kupryanovich published in the February issue of the magazine "Young Technician" a simplified design of the device, the ATR of which can work with only 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 the subscriber, it was necessary, in addition to the receiver, to turn on the transmitter on the "handset" as well. Hearing a long telephone beep in the earpiece and making the appropriate switches, one could proceed to dialing. But still, it was more convenient than on the radio stations of that time, since it was not necessary to switch from reception to transmission and end 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 youth magazine, Kupriyanovich was not afraid of competition. By this time, he had already prepared a new model of the apparatus, which at that time can be considered revolutionary.

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

The mobile phone model of 1958, together with the power supply, weighed only 500 grams.

This weight limit was again taken by world technical thought only ... on 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 dial, to which an ordinary telephone receiver was connected on a wire. It turned out that during the conversation either both hands were occupied, or the box had to be hung on the belt. On the other hand, holding a light plastic handset from a household telephone was much more convenient than a device with the weight of an army pistol (According to Martin Cooper, using a mobile phone helped him build muscle well).
According to Kupriyanovich's calculations, his apparatus 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.е. 30-40 rubles "new". In the late 50s, simple transistor receivers had a similar retail price, so we can assume that this is an underestimate. On the other hand, based on the fact that, technically, the radio background was hardly more complicated than semiconductor televisions, it can be assumed that its price, after technologization, could be kept within the range of 150-200 rubles by "new", which is equivalent to about 2.5 of the average monthly salary in 1958 year. Since at that time the main goal for citizens was to buy a TV, a washing machine and a refrigerator, then the market capacity of such devices in private ownership, if sold by 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 issue of the magazine "Tekhnika-molodezhi" for 1959, now up to a thousand channels of communication of radiophones with the Asia-Pacific Region could be placed on one wave. To do this, the coding of the number in the radiophone was carried out in a pulsed way, 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 correlator was based on the vocoder principle - the division of the speech signal into several frequency ranges, compression of each range and subsequent restoration at the reception point. True, the recognition of the voice should have deteriorated, but with the quality of the then wired communication, this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing the ATP on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees installed a base station fifteen years later 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 Ogonyok, the most prestigious magazine in the USSR. The inventor is invited to a meeting of the creative club at the magazine, which is called just that - "On the Spark". Together with Kupriyanovich, Anatoly Yakovlevich Lepin, one of the most popular jazz composers of the USSR, 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 only the accordion knew how ...". Another guest of the famous magazine is a foreigner: the German documentary filmmaker, the famous anti-fascist Andre Thorndike. Now they would say that the young engineer was among the "stars"
"Having a portable radiotelephone, which is assigned a city network number, the subscriber can be called from any place, wherever he is. Using a cordless phone will significantly expand the telephone network, first inside Soviet Union, and later beyond it. "That's exactly what was written in issue 7 of the Ogonyok magazine for 1959. The Soviet mobile communications network was supposed to become international.

If the editors only knew what a cult item the mobile phone would become at the beginning of the next century, the photo of both the phone and the inventor would certainly have made it to the cover. However, in those days there were other events that were considered more important, at least for the press. The 21st 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 from the rostrum of the congress, and suggested that the USA should catch up. But the recently launched third satellite shocked Americans much more then. In addition, one of the fastest whaling bases in the world "Soviet Ukraine" left the slipway, and nylon coats were shown in the model house of the Moscow City Council of National Economy (also the future, but closer). Therefore, they write about the mobile phone on page 29, after a report about how the delegates of the congress look at the VDNKh miracle machine "Ural-375" - "this truck will not know obstacles in its path."

In 1960, Kupriyanovich's mobile phone was exhibited at VDNKh, in the "Radioelectronics 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 as many as five models were exhibited, a miracle of modern technology - color TVs according to the 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 do now. In this firework of miracles, the mobile phone was hard to spot.

"So far there are only prototypes of the new device, but there is no doubt that it will soon be widely used in transport, in the city telephone network, in industry, at construction sites, etc." writes Kupriyanovich in the journal "Science and Life" in August 1957. But the biggest sensation was yet to come.

5. PDA FOR GAGARIN'S FLIGHT.

In 1961 L.I. Kupriyanovich demonstrates to APN reporters Yury Rybchinsky and V. Shcherbakov... a pocket mobile phone. Seeing this device, the modern reader will surely exclaim "It can't be!" Indeed, to create a telephone 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 Soviet Information Bureau, is a very solid organization whose task is to convey information about the USSR to foreign media. Here there can be no unverified facts threatening revelations and scandals.
I suppose the reader has already come to his senses after the sight of the Soviet PDA, and can easily perceive the other data of the device. Kupriyanovich brought the weight of the mobile phone to only 70 grams. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, not all mobile phones can boast of this. True, the PDA of 1961 has a minimum of functions, there is no display and the dialer is small - apparently, you will have to turn it with a pencil. But there is no better anywhere in the world yet, and there will not be for a long time. According to Rybchinsky's description, this apparatus of Kupriyanovich 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 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 indicated is not surprising at that time. There were times when the manufacturer of consumer electronics was not indicated even in the instruction manual.
"Already now, many experts consider the new means of communication a serious rival to the conventional telephone." - the correspondent of APN informed readers. - "Transport, industrial and agricultural enterprises, geological exploration parties, construction - this is by no means a complete list of possible applications for telephone communication without wires. In order to serve a city like Moscow with radiophony, only ten automatic telephone radio stations will be required. 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 with a range of 200 kilometers.
Parallel to the APN report, the Soviet press received information from another Soviet whale of mass media - the telegraph agency of the Soviet Union (TASS). 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 in its own name, reflecting the government's point of view. The TASS article in Orlovskaya Pravda was shorter and contained no photographs, but it confirmed the following facts:
- Kupriyanovich created a new model of a mobile phone;
- a new sample can be carried in your pocket;
- the phone 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 base station being designed, and the TASS message meant the one with which the prototype was tested, then there is no contradiction between the data. Accordingly, it follows from the TASS message 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 at least in 1960. In his article "Wireless Telephone", published in the journal "Scientific and Technical Societies of the USSR., Volume 2, Issues 7-12, Profizdat, 1960, C.," he wrote: "A wireless telephone - a radiophone is convenient because they can use in any conditions. small metal box free to fit in the palm of your hand..."

"At present, serial production of radiophones is being prepared at one of our enterprises," confirms L.I. Kupriyanovich in his note "Radiofon", published in issue 11 of the magazine "Inventor and Rationalizer" for 1961. The article confirms that several samples of radio backgrounds have been created. True, the attached photo shows not a handheld, but a sample in a 1958 case, but without a handset and an external antenna. The data of this model given in the article differ from those published earlier: the weight is not 500, but 300 grams. The device is assembled on semiconductors, powered by nickel-cadmium batteries, it was supposed to ensure the operation of the device for 30-50 hours. But this will hardly surprise those who were engaged in amateur radio - improving the design, enthusiasts often put a new "stuffing" into a previously made case. According to Kupriyanovich, the device in serial production should have cost only 30-40 rubles. Such a price seems to be underestimated, and perhaps Kupriyanovich simply proceeded from the prices of components.
The same note briefly described the mobile communication system proposed by Kupriyanovich. "In order to increase the number of radiophones capable of simultaneously operating on the same wave, but in different areas, the coverage area of the ATP over the air is divided into microdistricts. In each microdistrict, set-top boxes for the ATP are installed, operating on the same wave, and connected in parallel to the telephone network. The coverage areas of the ATP set-top boxes overlap. Thus, when moving from one microdistrict to another, communication is not interrupted. Up to several hundred portable radiophones can operate on one set-top box to the ATP.
From this description, we can conclude that Kupriyanovich was trying to create a system with cellular functions, but operating on a different principle. Although it is still not clear from the description what will happen if several owners of mobile phones operating on the same wavelength enter the same microdistrict.

Another presentation of the work 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 journal "Knowledge-Power" for 1961, p. 6-7.
"Pocket radiotelephones based on semiconductors and micromodules will eventually become available everyone(Italics mine - O.I.) and then it will be possible to realize the old and cherished dream of signalmen - the so-called universal connection, designed to connect all people with a constantly working pocket phone.
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 bypass the problems associated with the transition from one base station to another. The call signal received by one of the district 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 district stations. Having received a call signal, the subscriber answered the call. If the subscriber was in another city, the signal was transmitted to the central base station of this city via a satellite communication channel. Note that at that time the number of cargo launches into orbit around the world could be counted on the fingers. "It will be possible to talk on the phone at any time with any point on the globe!" - wrote F. Chestnov.
Of course, compared to modern cellular communication systems, hierarchical communication 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 satellite phone. The hierarchical system was most beneficial for providing mobile communications to large cities. Thus, although this communication system did not allow in practice to fully provide mobile communication services to the entire population, nevertheless, until the 90s it was a real competitor to cellular communication.

And then there was silence - at least in the leading popular science publications. According to data requiring verification, in 1963 the Ogonyok magazine wrote about Kupriyanovich's mobile phone.
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 a radio station with an automatic call and a range of 40-50 km, in the January issue of "Technics - Youth" for 1961 - a popular article on microelectronics technologies "Radio receiver under a microscope". In the November issue of "TM" - another article: "Europe is looking at Red Square." All this, of course, is necessary and relevant, but what about the world achievement of our Soviet science?

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

6. "I'm tormented by vague doubts."

Skeptics, first of all, pay attention to the fact that in the publications that popular science publications devoted to the radio background, the sensational fact of the first telephone calls was not covered. From the photographs, it is also impossible to accurately determine whether the inventor is calling on a mobile phone, or just posing. Hence the version arises: yes, there was an attempt to create a mobile phone, but technically the device could not be completed, so they did not write about it anymore. However, let's think about the question: why 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 phone? Not bad, not bad. But it turns out that you can also call on it? It's just a miracle! I would never have believed it!"
Common sense suggests that not a single Soviet popular science magazine would write about a non-working design in 1957-1961. Such magazines already had something to write about. Satellites fly in space, and then people. Physicists have established that the cascade hyperon decays into a lambda null 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 and 35 minutes. Computers translate from one language to another and play chess. The 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 videophones! “Telephone sets with screens can be built even today, our technology is strong enough,” they write in the same “TM” ... in 1956. "Millions of viewers are waiting for the radio engineering industry to start producing color TV sets. It's high time to think about television broadcasting by wire (cable TV - O.I.)" - we read in the same issue. And here, you understand, the mobile is somehow outdated, even without a video camera and a color display. Well, who would write at least half a word about her if she did not work?
Then why did the "first call" come to be considered a sensation? The answer is simple: it has become a sensation just now. April 3, 1973 Martin Cooper held a PR campaign. For Motorola to be able to obtain approval from the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) to use radio frequencies for civilian mobile communications, it was necessary to somehow show that mobile communications really had a future. Moreover, competitors claimed the same frequencies. And it is no coincidence that Martin Cooper's first call, according to his own story to the San Francisco Chronicle reporters, was addressed to a rival: "It was this guy from AT&T who promoted car phones. 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 said. But you know, I heard his teeth grinding."
In the American press, information about the fateful call was difficult to find. More precisely, not about the call itself, but about creating a phone. It looks like Popular Science readers didn't 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. Then he occupied a whole closet.

Kupriyanovich did not need to share frequencies with a competing company in 1957-1961 and listen to their teeth grinding 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 conducted PR campaigns - the way it was customary in the USSR. He came to the editorial offices of popular science publications, demonstrated devices, and wrote articles about them himself. It is quite probable that the letters "YuT" in the name of the first apparatus are a trick to interest the editors of "Young Technician" in placing its publication. For unknown reasons, only the leading amateur radio magazine of the country, Radio, as well as all other designs of Kupriyanovich, except for the pocket radio of 1955, bypassed the topic of the radio background.

Did Kupriyanovich himself have any motives to show how to create and show journalists over the course of the whole five years as many as three different non-working devices - for example, in order to achieve success or recognition? In the publications of the 50s, the place of work of the inventor 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 degree of candidate of technical sciences, later he worked at the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR and in the early 60s had a car (for which, by the way, he himself created a radiotelephone and anti-theft radio alarm) . In other words, by Soviet standards, he was a very successful person. Two of Kupriyanovich's inventions were patented in the USA in the 1970s. Doubters can also check out a couple of dozen published amateur designs, including one adapted for young technicians, the LK-1.
Let's look at the question from the other side. Maybe at that time in the same USA there were many similar amateur designs? Let's open the February 1958 issue of Modern Mechanics with an article by J.R. Pierce, Director of Telecommunications Research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, titled "Telephones of Tomorrow." Who better than him to know about it.
"Does this (the appearance of pocket pagers - OI) 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 miniaturized transistor receiver that can operate 24 hours a day without significantly draining a car battery. Together with a suitable transmitter, a car phone can be placed in the glove compartment or combined with a radio. And then not pocket phones will be absurd."
If we assume that the head of 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 USA. He just thinks the idea is not crazy. Of course in the future.
Do not think that the Americans did not dream of such a phone at all. In September 1956, the same magazine publishes a fascinating article, "Your Telephone of Tomorrow." About how one night in the future on the Market Street in San Francisco, a young man calls his friend in Rome on a mobile phone. From video. With 3-D video. In the America of the future, every baby will be given a phone number from birth. If a person is not reached by phone, then he is dead. Here is such an optimistic forecast.
The radiophone played, perhaps, only one important role in the life of Kupriyanovich - it determined the choice of a life path. "Leonid Kupriyanovich worked for several years on his invention, first as an amateur, and then radio became his profession." - wrote Yuri Rybchinsky.

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

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

First of all, bureaucratic obstacles to cellular communication existed both in the USSR and in the USA. It took the FCC 21 years to officially allow the widespread use of cell phones by civilians. On the other hand, in the USSR, the issues of the use of radio communications by civilians were rather quickly resolved, if it was not personal, but official use. In the 1960s, the USSR launched the nationwide automotive communication service "Altai", which was quite good for that time. Then maybe bureaucratic thoughtlessness is to blame? Say, the officials did not appreciate the merits of cellular communications and did not move forward. Moreover, one of the authoritative experts said: "Cell phones have no future, while communication in cars is already used today" ... Stop. But these words were sounded not in 1959, but in 1973, not in the USSR, but in the USA, and this was stated by the private company Bell. Moreover, based on motives familiar from Soviet production films, the company promoted an automobile 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 who wanted to acquire an expensive novelty were forced to sign up in the queue for 5-10 years in advance. It was possible to correct the situation only in 1983, moreover, in a purely Soviet way - "by pull". Motorola founder Paul Galvin, using his personal connections and acquaintance with US Vice President George W. Bush, was able to get him to meet 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 in the literal sense was decided by a call from above.

Could such a story happen in the USSR? Could. Moreover, it happened at the end of the 50s, as they say, after the visit of a government delegation to Japan (and here Japan played a role). The Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR on the development of a new VHF radiotelephone communication system was issued, in which a number of enterprises and institutions were appointed developers of this system: the State Union Design Institute (GSPI), Moscow, the Research Institute of Switching Technology, Leningrad, the 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 the Gold Medal at the Brussels International Exhibition.

"Altai" from the very beginning had specific customers, on which the allocation of funds depended. In addition, the main problem in the implementation of both projects was not at all in creating a portable device, but in the need for significant investments and time in creating the communication infrastructure and its debugging and the cost of maintaining it. During the deployment of "Altai", for example, in Kyiv, the output lamps of transmitters failed, in Tashkent problems arose due to poor-quality installation of base station equipment. As the magazine "Radio" wrote, in 1968 the "Altai" system was deployed only in Moscow and Kyiv, Samarkand, Tashkent, Donetsk and Odessa were next in line.
Mobile communication in the early 60s in any country would have been a rather expensive service that only a small part of the population could afford. A potential customer - a major Western businessman or a Soviet leader - did not then have a need to carry a phone in his pocket. At work or at home, they were provided with a wired connection, and in the open air they always had a car with a driver, where they could not think about the dimensions and weight of the equipment. From this point of view, "Altai" corresponded well to the then demand. 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.

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

8. UNDER THE BALKAN STARS.

In the early 1960s, the echo of publications about Kupriyanovich's radio background had not subsided yet. So, in the book of K.K. Boboshko "It is interesting to know" the 1958 model is mentioned. 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, the device was described in a plastic case smaller than it was in the picture of 1958 - 110 * 80 * 30 mm, although heavier - 700 grams, made entirely on transistors. Instead of a handset (according to the textual description), the device used a piezoelectric speaker, which simultaneously served as a loudspeaker; nickel-cadmium batteries were used for power, the range of the apparatus was 80 km. It was also reported that the radiophone will find wide application 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 models of mobile phones, for which he received the Dimitrov Prize. In an interview with journalist Zornitsa Veselinova, Bachvarov said that he exhibited a mobile phone 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.
According to unverified data, Bachvarov's experimental sample had two communication channels, operated in the 60-70 MHz frequency range and was used as a demonstrator; the second sample of the device was handed over to the head of state T. Zhivkov for promotion purposes. That is, according to these data, Bachvarov's prototype consisted of two long-range radio tubes. In publications, it is sometimes stated that Bachvarov in 1959 allegedly invented "according to the essence of today's jiesem", which is not true, because. The specification for the GSM standard has been developed since 1982 and was published in 1992.
The description of the phone was published in the Bulgarian journal "Science and Technology for the Young" 7-8, 1965. Until 1965, it was reported that Christo 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 the RATC-6 base station, which allowed connecting up to 15 subscribers. With a mobile phone transmitter power of 0.2 watts, communication with the base station was provided within a radius of 12 kilometers. A 2-watt amplifier 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. For the conversation, a combined microphone-loudspeaker on the front panel was used. The duration of work 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 Bachvarov as the director of a research laboratory at the State Committee for Science and Technological Progress, and indicated a range of 50 km (probably including an amplifier).

At the exhibition "Inforga-65" 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 the engineers Yu. Popov and Yu. Pukhnachev in their article "Inforga-65", published in the journal "Science and Life" number 8, 1965. “To implement wireless communication, they used a system developed several years ago by a Soviet inventor, engineer L. Kupriyanovich. A special set-top box serving 15 radio telephones is connected to the city telephone network. During a conversation, its antenna captures information coming from radio telephones 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 of the USSR (Studio TSSDF (RTSSDF), with the participation of VDNKh of the USSR, director Rymarev D., cameraman G. Epifanov, scriptwriters Dmitryuk N. and Nadinsky V.), 1966 year, part number 2.
So, the journal "Science and Life" called the father of the Bulgarian mobile communications not Bachvarov, but Kupriyanovich. At a minimum, this means that the groundwork created by L.I. Kupriyanovich. The apparatus of the firm "Radioelectronics" had dimensions larger than the apparatus of Kupriyanovich, demonstrated in 1961; this is not at all surprising, because restrictions on the transfer of technology abroad, including to Eastern European countries, could play 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 exhibition "Interorgtekhnika-66" were the so-called "automatic radiotelephones" RAT-0.5 and ATRT-0.5, which allow "radio communication on the VHF band with any telephone subscriber of the city, region and enterprise without special device for his telephone. As you can see in the picture, this mobile phone already resembled a modern one (with the exception, of course, of a dialer), easily fit in the hand and generally fit the description of 1964. The devices were assembled on transistors and could be included in any automatic telephone exchange using the RATC-10 base station.

Initially, six mobile phones could work simultaneously through one base station. This, of course, is less than the first Motorola base station, where there were 30 subscribers, but in 1966 Motorola was still only engaged in the first walkie-talkies. The limitation of the number of subscribers to six was due to the number distribution system: emergency numbers started from one, city numbers from zero, internal departmental numbers from nine, and one number had to be assigned to the base station operator; thus, without installing an additional switchboard, six numbers remained 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, with two switches, or the selection was automatic under the action of a frequency-modulated signal in the channel. The base station continuously transmitted a multi-tone tone code on each channel. The mobile phone had several narrow-band filters for detecting tones after the demodulator, DIP switches for selecting "own" tones and comparators for 8 or 12 bits from the 74th series. If the channel had its own tone code, then the mobile phone was receiving and transmitting in this channel. If "own" tone code was not found, the mobile phone switched transmission to the "common/service" channel, and the receiving channel began searching for its code sequentially through all channels. Channel switching of channels was carried out until its own code appeared at the output of the demodulator.

The speech signal had amplitude modulation, and therefore the selection signal was perceived as significant background noise. Sometimes external noise that got through the microphone in the channel led to spontaneous channel switching. Later, timers began to be used 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, power grids, chemical plants, especially since this system provided for a conference call mode. The RATC series devices were produced and improved until the 80s inclusive. At the Sofia-Vostok TPP, the equipment was dismantled and replaced with more modern equipment 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 communication system ("national system for radio communication"). Unfortunately, after the death in 1977, Prof. Bradistilov's work was halted for 10 years.

9. IN THE SERVICE OF COMMUNISM.

If the Bulgarian apparatus 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. "For wireless two-way communication with moving objects in large enterprises, radio communication is used using, for example, a radiophone, which is a portable wireless telephone equipped with a dialer." - a common phrase from the books of the 60s.

In the first volume of the collection of articles "Cybernetics - at the service of communism", published in 1961 under the editorship of 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 mobile objects, a radiophone has been developed, which is an automatic telephone with a dialer for calling a subscriber of an automatic telephone exchange or a subscriber at 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-workshop transport, mobile cranes, construction sites, etc.) in difficult terrain."
The scientific and practical importance of this collection is already evidenced by the fact that in the next section we find an article by A.I. Kitov, where he outlines the idea of creating the Internet in the USSR - at that level of technology, of course.
A mobile phone, as a means of departmental communication, in the 60s - 70s mentions a number of publications devoted to the organization and planning of production.
"An interesting new means of communication, which, unfortunately, has not yet received distribution, is the radiophone proposed by L.I. can be successfully applied as an effective tool ... "(Operational production planning at a machine-building enterprise. Ivanov, Nikolai Filippovich. M. Gosplanizdat, 1961.).
"Among the radio communication facilities presented at the exhibition, one should note equipment of the RTM, RTN and radiophone types ... The prototype radiophone shown at the exhibition allows two-way communication within a radius of 20 - 25 km from the so-called automatic telephone radio station." (Bulletin of Scientific Information "Labor and Wage", Volume 3, Issues 7-12 1960.).
"For the needs of management, 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 turn on like a regular subscriber without wires ..." (Control Technology. Publishing house of Moscow University, 1968, 162 p.)
"The radiophone is a wireless telephone. When dialing the number of a city subscriber of the automatic telephone exchange, an automatic connection is made with any subscriber of the city's telephone network." (651.2 L 55. Lieberman, V. B. Mechanization and automation of managerial work at the enterprise [Text]: practical guide/ V. B. Liberman, F. M. Rusinov. - M.: Economics, 1968.)
"As a means of institutional communications, 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 1960s, the need for the production of mobile phones for the USSR, at least as a means of departmental communications, received scientific justification. Let us pay attention to the fact that the listed publications already mention not only developments, but also implementation.
In 1965, in one of the issues of the Pskovskaya Pravda newspaper, a TASS article entitled "A radiotelephone was created" was found. At first glance, nothing new is reported in it - we are talking about stationary and automobile radiotelephones, one of the creators is Gennady Merkulov. However, this is not Altai, but alternative solutions for local facilities, and the most interesting information is in a few lines: "Now the plant is developing a pocket radiotelephone with small 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 is it an independent development, has not yet been established. However, on page 322 of L.V. Bobrov ("In Search of a Miracle" - M .: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1968. - 336 pp.) there was a quote from the speech of the Minister of Radio Industry of the USSR V.D. Kalmykov: "The new portable transistor radio stations weighing 800 grams and a portable radiotelephone will be of great help in organizing communications in industry, transport, construction and agriculture." We are talking about a portable radiotelephone, not a car one.

In Alexey Bogomolov's article "Special telephones for special people", published in the newspaper "Sovershenno sekretno", No.8/291, one more mobile phone was mentioned. "In the photo of the head of the Soviet government Alexei Kosygin, taken on a walk in Kislovodsk in the mid-seventies, you can see a security officer with a small bag. In it, in fact, there was a mobile communication device of those years." The non-pocket dimensions of the phone were by no means due to technical backwardness - as follows from A. Bogomolov's article, an information security system was also built into the phone. 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 yet been reported in the open press.

10. WHAT IS THE WEST?

Western European countries also made attempts to create mobile communications before the "historic Cooper call". Barely a year after Bulgaria showed off its mobile phones in Moscow, the November issue of Science & Mechanics magazine featured the so-called Carry Phone as a new service. True, in terms of dimensions and weight, the novelty of Western technology was clearly inferior to the novelties of the East. Yes, and convenience too.

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In a market economy, when the demand for such a service was still unclear, the state policy regarding such an infrastructure was not defined, and investments in this market segment went precisely into the development of a car radiotelephone, such an approach could be considered reasonable. Later in the United States, similar devices called "attache" phones "(portfolio phones) developed as a segment of the automotive communications market. In particular, they were produced by American firms 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 in the USA a mobile phone was called a phone installed just in a car, as in the Soviet Altai system. Most of these phones, released then in the USA, 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 a new communications infrastructure, telephone radio extenders became. As noted in the September 1967 issue of the American magazine Popular Mechanics, Sibony Mfg.Corp in Greenwich, Connecticut, offered the "New Pocket Phone" - attachments to wired telephones that allowed you to establish communication with a small radio tube at a distance of 1-2 miles.

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

Radio extenders were also created, from which it was possible to make outgoing calls. So, in 1970, the American company Satellite Phone communications offered a radio extension cable not in the form of a handset, but in the form of an ordinary desk phone with a disk that could be dragged from place to place and placed anywhere in the house. This pleasure even by American standards was also quite decent - $ 395, like a TV or a microwave oven at that time. These 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 telephone device using the already existing car or wire telephone infrastructure. The birth of a "mobile phone" now began to rest only on the emergence of a new infrastructure suitable for working with handheld communications.

April 11, 1972, i.e. one year before Cooper's call, the British firm 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 call the city telephone network.

But back 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 considers the problems of "recording" information into the subconscious during special "sleep at the informational level". To put a person into a state of such a dream, Kupriyanovich creates the "Ritmoson" device and puts forward the idea of a new service - mass teaching people in their sleep by phone, and the biocurrents of people control the sleep devices through the central computer.
But this idea of Kupriyanovich remains unrealized, and in his book Biological Rhythms and Sleep, published in 1973, the Ritmoson device is mainly positioned as a device for correcting sleep disorders.
The reasons, perhaps, should be sought in the phrase from the "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." At the informational level, a person in a state of sleep can, in principle, memorize not only foreign words for memorization, but also advertising slogans, background information designed for unconscious perception, and a person is not able to control this process, and may not even remember whether he is in such a state of sleep. There are too many moral and ethical problems here, and the current human society is clearly not ready for the mass application of such technologies.
Solutions in this area proposed by Kupriyanovich were protected by patents both in the USSR and abroad (author's certificates 500802, 506420, 1258420, 1450829, US patent 4289121, Canadian patent 1128136). The last copyright certificate was claimed 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 (until about the early 90s, until retirement age) he used his device to treat patients. According to Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences N.F. Izmerov, L.I. Kupriyanovich was periodically involved in work on closed topics, carried out with the help of his apparatus the rehabilitation of major leaders of the state. Colleagues considered him a talented person and largely underestimated by his contemporaries. According to his daughter, he periodically recalled in conversations about the times of working on a mobile phone, as something bright and important. Kupriyanovich passed away in 1994.

Other mobile communication pioneers also changed the subject of work.

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

12. "WHO ARE YOU, DOCTOR ZORGE?"

Oddly enough, but the personality of L.I. Kupriyanovich to this day remains one of the most mysterious in the history of domestic electronics. Despite the large number of 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, which is allegedly based on real events, one of the heroes of the story, Yuri Kubyshkin, creates a pocket walkie-talkie, which he also calls "radiophone", model YuK-5 UK-RAF , which again echoes the "LK-1". Kubyshkin also has a car. Was not 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 suggests itself that Kupriyanovich could work at NII-885, had a high salary and all the possibilities for creating miniature equipment, and left there just in connection with the reorganization of 1963. However, so far there are no facts that would directly or indirectly confirm this.

In 2014, the Rossiya channel showed the film by Alexander Evsyukov "Who is the first? Chronicle of scientific plagiarism", where, in particular, it was told about Kupriyanovich's phone: the filmmakers managed to find the relatives of the inventor. Unfortunately, Leonid Ivanovich himself was no longer alive. His wife, Olga Kupriyanovich, and daughter told 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 state the reason. Now we can assume, perhaps, the simplest explanation - in the field of medical technology it was easier to defend a dissertation, to confirm the implementation of the developed system in practice. A scientific 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 occupations would be simple and understandable.

In the film by A. Evsyukov, three samples of Kupriyanovich's mobile phones were also 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 in other sources by the author of the site. The latter, with the inscription "Moscow", judging by the design, had a microphone and a speaker in the case. Whether it was the same model that was exhibited at VDNH and was preparing for mass production (the design of the sample is quite industrial) is still unknown.

In 2015, a film was released on the TV channel "Russia - Culture" called "The Riddle of LK-1". In this film, the daughter of the inventor, Vera Leonidovna Sokolova (Kupriyanovich), recalls that Leonid Ivanovich continued to personally use one of the created samples of a mobile phone for some time as a car phone. She also mentions that in the 1950s, a certain promotional video was shot about Kupriyanovich's mobile phone, which should include a fishing episode.

Surprisingly, this film was found. 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 shooting was done in 1958. You can download a fragment of the newsreel. Frames and fragment taken from the publicly available film magazine on the site net-film.ru

At the moment, the frames of this newsreel are so far the only newsreel found, which captures the inventor of the mobile phone himself and thanks to which we can hear his voice. In addition, for the time being, it can be considered the world's first documentary film, which shows calls on a mobile phone, and the world's first mobile phone users. The plot shows three calls - one incoming, a woman calls from a city machine, and two outgoing calls - from the fifth plantation of the Lenin state farm, where a state farm worker calls the office to send a car for the harvested strawberries, and from the river, where the fisherman calls home. It can be assumed that the shooting was carried out somewhere on the territory of the present CJSC "State Farm named after Lenin", located near the Moscow Ring Road.
Characteristically, the demonstration of a mobile phone in the film and here does not cause a feeling of sensation among others. People are surprised that a regular phone can be called by radio, but they do not perceive this as a historical event. The plot ends with the journalist's phrase - "It must be assumed 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 tool. Computers and mobile phones. Something without which a person's life at the beginning of the third millennium is not conceivable.

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 being heard from the White House that the Russians, they say, do not produce anything ("Russia doesn't make anything"), which, well, very much resembles the words of one historical person who is now not popular in Germany that "Russia does not yet have a single plant of its own that could really make, say, a real live truck."

12. INSTEAD OF EPILOGUE.

Thirty 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.
So the mobile phone became a means of influencing the minds of politicians - just like the first satellite in the Khrushchev era. Although, unlike the satellite, the operating mobile phone was not really an indicator of technical superiority - the same Khrushchev had the opportunity to call on it ...
"Wait!" - the reader will object. "So who should be considered the creator of the first mobile phone - Cooper, Kupriyanovich, Bachvarov?"
It seems that it makes no sense to oppose the results of the work here. Economic opportunities for the mass use of the new service were formed only by 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 his sincere gratitude to Dimo Stoyanov and Peter Khinkov for information about the history of mobile communication in Bulgaria, Alexander Aloyan (newspaper "Orlovskaya Pravda") and Alexander Evsukov.

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 wearable automatic duplex portable radiotelephone LK-1 - the forerunner of cellular communications.

Biography

In 1953 he graduated from Moscow State Technical University. N. E. Bauman, majoring in Radioelectronics, Faculty of Instrument Engineering. The exact place of work until the mid-60s was not reported to the family. On November 4, 1957, he received patent No. 115494 for a "Device for calling and switching radiotelephone communication channels", which outlined the fundamental principles of mobile telephony, compression and decompression of signals, circuit diagram mobile phone device. Also, the principles and the electrical circuit were outlined 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 Science and Life; the automobile use case was described in the magazine "Behind the wheel"; messages about the invention were given by TASS and APN. In 1957, Kupriyanovich publicly showed a working prototype of an automatic mobile phone LK-1 weighing 3 kg; a year later there was a prototype weighing only 500 grams, and in 1961 the device, which Kupriyanovich called the radiophone, weighed only 70 grams. The radiophone communicated with the city telephone exchange through a base station (automatic telephone radio station, ATP). The author argued: “To serve a city like Moscow with radiophone communications, only ten automatic telephone radio stations are required. The first of these stations has been designed in the new metropolitan area - Mazilovo. For personal use(or, as the first stage of implementation), a radio extender mode for the existing subscriber line was proposed with the connection of a personal ATR 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 "used a system developed several years ago by the Soviet inventor, engineer L. Kupriyanovich." The following year, Bulgaria presented at the Interorgtekhnika-66 exhibition a set of mobile communications from PAT-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.

From the second half of the 60s, L. I. Kupriyanovich changed his place of work and was engaged in the creation of medical equipment. Creates the device "Ritmoson", which controls the sleep and wakefulness of a person, publishes scientific work memory improvement and hypnopedia. According to the words of Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences N.F. Izmerov in the film “The Riddle of LK-1”, L.I. recovery of major state leaders.

Bibliography

Bornovolokov E.P., Kupriyanovich L.I. Portable VHF radio stations. - M.: Publishing house DOSAAF, 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. Reserves for memory improvement. Cybernetic aspects. - M. Nauka, 1970. - 142 p.
Kupriyanovich L. I. Biological rhythms and sleep. - M.: Nauka, 1976. - 120 p.

Until the early 1960s, many companies refused to do cellular research at all, because they concluded that, in principle, it was impossible to create a compact cellular telephone. And none of the specialists of these companies paid attention to the fact that on the other side of the "iron curtain" photographs began to appear in popular science magazines, which depicted ... a man talking on a mobile phone.

In 1957, in the 8th issue of the journal Science and Life, a photograph of Leonid Kupriyanovich's first mobile phone was published. On the right is an automatic telephone radio station: “The ATP connection with any subscriber occurs, like with a conventional telephone, only we control its operation at a distance.”
In 1957 L.I. Kupriyanovich received a copyright certificate for "Radiofon" - 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 Radiophone transmitter. By that time, the first operating set of equipment was also ready, demonstrating the principle of operation of the "Radiophone", named by the inventor of LK-1 (Leonid Kupriyanovich, the first sample).
LK-1, by our standards, was still difficult to call a mobile phone, but it made a great impression on contemporaries. "The telephone apparatus is small in size, its weight does not exceed three kilograms," wrote Science and Life. "The batteries are placed inside the body of the device; their period of continuous use is 20-30 hours. The LK-1 has 4 special radio tubes, so that the output power from the antenna is sufficient for short-wave communication within 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 dialing dial.

"The range of the device ... several tens of kilometers," writes Leonid Kupriyanovich in a note for the July issue of the magazine "Young Technician" in 1957. "If there is only one receiving device within these limits, this will be enough to talk with any of the inhabitants of the city who has a telephone, and for as many kilometers as you like."

The magazine "Behind the wheel" in 1957 published a photograph of Leonid Kupriyanovich with an LK-1 telephone in a car. To the right of the phone is a loudspeaker.
Kupriyanovich foresaw that the mobile phone would also be able to displace phones built into cars. At the same time, the young inventor immediately used something like a "hands free" headset, i. a speakerphone was used instead of an earpiece. In an interview with M. Melgunova, published in the magazine "Behind the Wheel", 12, 1957, Kupriyanovich suggested introducing mobile phones in two stages. “At first, while there are few radio telephones, an additional radio device is usually installed near the car enthusiast’s home telephone. But later, when there are thousands of such devices, the ATP will no longer work for one radio telephone, 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, which makes its relay work." Thus, Kupriyanovich essentially positioned two types of household appliances at once - simple radio tubes, which were easier to put into production, and a mobile phone service, in which one base station serves thousands of subscribers.

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

Handheld radio of Kupriyanovich
The 1960 edition describes a simple three-transistor radio that can be worn on the arm, much like the famous watch walkie-talkie from Dead Season. The author offered it for tourists and mushroom pickers to repeat, but in life, students showed interest in this design of Kupriyanovich mainly - for tips on exams, which even entered the episode of Gaidai's comedy film "Operation Y".

The mobile phone model of 1958, together with the power supply, weighed only 500 grams.

The device of 1958 was already more like mobile phones ("Technique-youth", 2, 1959)
This weight limit was again taken by world technical thought only ... on 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 dial, to which an ordinary telephone receiver was connected on a wire. It turned out that during the conversation either both hands were occupied, or the box had to be hung on the belt. On the other hand, holding a light plastic handset from a household telephone was much more convenient than a device with the weight of an army pistol.
According to Kupriyanovich's calculations, his apparatus should have cost 300-400 Soviet rubles. It was equal to the cost of a good TV or a light motorcycle; at such a price, the device would be available, of course, not to every Soviet family, but quite a few could save up for it if they wished. 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 issue of the magazine "Tekhnika-molodezhi" for 1959, now up to a thousand channels of communication of radiophones with the Asia-Pacific Region could be placed on one wave. To do this, the coding of the number in the radiophone was carried out in a pulsed way, 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 correlator was based on the vocoder principle - the division of the speech signal into several frequency ranges, compression of each range and subsequent restoration at the reception point. True, the recognition of the voice should have deteriorated, but with the quality of the then wired communication, this was not a serious problem. Kupriyanovich proposed installing the ATP on a high-rise building in the city (Martin Cooper's employees installed a base station fifteen years later 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.

Kupriyanovich brought the weight of the mobile phone to only 70 grams. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, not all mobile phones can boast of this. True, the PDA of 1961 has a minimum of functions, there is no display and the dialer is small - apparently, you will have to turn it with a pencil. But there is no better anywhere in the world yet, and there will not be for a long time. According to Rybchinsky's description, this apparatus of Kupriyanovich 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 80 km.
The TASS article in Orlovskaya Pravda was shorter and contained no photographs, but it confirmed the following facts:
- Kupriyanovich created a new model of a mobile phone;
- a new sample can be carried in your pocket;
- the phone contains a receiver and two transmitters;
- powered by nickel-cadmium batteries.
It follows from the TASS report that the microphone and telephone are built into the device, and the base station is connected to many telephones.

Bulgarian developers took the LK-1 concept and introduced their own mobile phones. In the USSR, in mass production cell phones didn't work.

However, in Moscow in 1963, an experimental zone of the Altai mobile communication system was launched: work on the antenna was carried out under the leadership of Kupriyanovich. Interestingly, this system operated in Voronezh until 2011, and in Novosibirsk, judging by the Wiki article, it still works.

Mobile communication in the early 60s in any country would have been a rather expensive service that only a small part of the population could afford. A potential customer - a major Western businessman or a Soviet leader - did not then have a need to carry a phone in his pocket. At work or at home, they were provided with a wired connection, and in the open air they always had a car with a driver, where they could not think about the dimensions and weight of the equipment. From this point of view, "Altai" corresponded well to the then demand. 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.

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 of 20-30 km. The solutions used in the telephone were patented on November 1, 1957.

1958

Already by 1958, Kupriyanovich reduced the weight of the device to 500 g. It was a box with toggle switches and a dialing disk. An ordinary telephone handset was connected to the box. During the conversation, there were two ways to hold the device. First, two hands could be used to hold the tube and box, which is not convenient. Or it was possible to hang the box on the belt, then only one hand was used to hold the tube.

The question arises why Kupriyanovich used a handset, and not built speakers into the phone itself. The fact is that the use of 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 muscle well. According to Kupriyanovich's calculations, if the device was launched into serial production, then 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 dialing dial. The disk was small and not intended to be rotated by fingers, most likely using a pen or pencil. The plans of the creator of the very first cell phone in the world was to create a portable phone the size of a matchbox and with a range of 200 km. It is 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 was started in 1958 at the Communications Research Institute of Voronezh. Designers created subscriber (actual telephones) and base stations, which ensured stable communication between subscribers. It was originally intended for installation in ambulances, taxis, trucks. However, in the future, for the most part, they began to be used by officials of various levels.

By 1970, the Altai telephone was in use in 30 Soviet cities. The device allowed to create conferences, for example, the manager could communicate with several subordinates at the same time. Each owner of the Altai phone had its own possibilities for using it. Someone had the opportunity to call other countries, someone to the phones of a particular city, and someone only to specific numbers.

Early 60s

In the early 1960s, the Bulgarian engineer Hristo Bachvarov created a prototype 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, as 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 communications kit consisting of a mobile phone the size of a handset and a base station for 15 numbers. 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 subsequently launched into a series. They were used at construction sites and energy facilities. Initially, one RATC-10 base station served only 6 numbers. Subsequently, this number increased to 69, and then to 699 numbers.

1967

In 1967, Carry Phone Co. (USA, California) introduced the mobile phone Carry Phone. Outwardly, the mobile phone was a standard diplomat, to which a telephone handset was connected. Its weight was 4.5 kg. With an 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 quite 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, which, in turn, connected the owner of the device with a specific number. This was not convenient for the owner of the phone, but nevertheless allowed the use of the already existing infrastructure of the car radiotelephone. The cost of 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 city number. The 12-channel device consisted of a Pocketphone 70 radio and a small box with dialing buttons.

1973

On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, head of Motorola's mobile communications division, introduced a prototype of the DynaTAC cell phone. Many believe that this particular device is the very first cell phone in the world, but this is not so. Its weight was 1.15 kg. The battery charge was enough for 35 minutes of work, it took 10 hours to recharge. There was an LED display showing only the dialed numbers.

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Leonid Kupriyanovich: how a Soviet engineer invented the mobile phone. Mobile phone that was born in the USSR Leonid kupriyanovich mobile

DOMESTIC MOBILE PHONES OF THE 50'S space age sensation

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Early 60s

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DOMESTIC MOBILE PHONES OF THE 50'S
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