The original mobile phones cost around £2,000 in the money of the day,  today that would be worth around £6,000, They also weighed in at around 6 Kg, and had to be carried around in a shoulder bag. They were not much use for lengthy conversations either – talk time was one hour maximum, and often much less.

Back in those days much of the wireless technology was based on the use of valves (or as our American friends like to call them, tubes). Wonderful though they were (and still they are used to make the very best in audio amplifiers), they were bulky, inefficient, used a lot of power and could get very hot.

One day three very clever men who worked at Bell Labs in the USA (their names were John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain) invented the transistor, which was a relatively small device that needed much less power than the valve yet performed a similar function.

A little later two similarly gifted men (Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce) combined transistors onto a single substrate, added components such as resistors and invented the integrated circuit. Nowadays a single integrated circuit can have over 40,000,000 transistors.

It is hardly surprising that the mobile phone has shrunk incredibly and that its functionality has increased from that of a rather clunky telephone to one that incorporates the computational capabilities of what would have back then been expected from only a supercomputer.

As well as these developments in size reduction and increased functionality, another factor that helped the mobile phone shrink has been developments in battery technology. Although mobile phones consume far less energy that their valve based ancestors, they are still power hungry. Recent development in batteries includes rechargeable lithium ion batteries which offer standby times of a week or so and talk times of up to 100 hours.

More recently lithium manganese oxide batteries have brought further improvements and the latest developments include polymer batteries that literally can be folded up to occupy minimal additional space.
Although for a while there was a drive to make mobile phones as tiny as possible, to some extent that has been reversed with the latest models such as the iPhone where superb quality display screens and web browsing capabilities are more important that phone miniaturisation.

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