Telecommunication
The conventional telephone was invented independently by Alexander Bell and Elisha Gray in 1876. Antonio Meucci invented the first device that allowed the electrical transmission of voice over a line in 1849. However Meucci's device was of little practical value because it relied upon the electrophonic effect and thus required users to place the receiver in their mouth to "hear" what was being said. The first commercial telephone services were set-up in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of New Haven and London.
W. Rae Young
In 1947, W. Rae Young proposed what are now called cell phones in a report to the RMA Systems Committee. Coworker Douglas H. Ring at Bell Labs, liked Young's idea about locating many mobile phone towers in a hexagonal cellular arrangement throughout each city so that every mobile phone user would be able to communicate from at least one cell through the telephone system. Douglas Ring credited W. Rae Young with suggesting the hexagonal cell layout and expanded on Rae Young's concept in another internal Technical Memo dated 11 December 1947. In 1951 Young was appointed Supervisor of the cellular systems engineering team and later became department head of cellular mobile phone development at Bell Labs.