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.
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.