History of mobile phones
A cellular telephone switching plan was described by Fluhr and Nussbaum in 1973, and a cellular telephone data signaling system was described in 1977 by Hachenburg et al.
Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy
The theory that Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea of the telephone rests on the similarity between drawings of liquid transmitters in his lab notebook of March 1876 to those of Gray's patent caveat of the previous month. However, there is extensive evidence that Bell had been using liquid transmitters in various experiments for over three years before that time. In 1875, Bell filed a patent application for a primitive fax machine which included drawings of multiple liquid transmitters and the Patent Office granted his application as Patent No. 161739 in April, 1875—ten months before Gray filed his telephone caveat. Experiments by Bell going back to his youth in Scotland show a steady, logical progression towards development of the telephone. Much of the documentation detailing these experiments includes drawings of liquid transmitters remarkably similar to the design which Bell is alleged to have stolen from Gray in 1876.