Mobile History

Just 27 years after Christopher Columbus first introduced America to the western world, Admiral Alvarez de Pineda, a Spanish explorer, became the first European to sail into the waters of Mobile Bay. The year was 1519, and it would be another twenty years before another European would actually take a step in today’s Alabama. Between 1540 and 1541, the well-known explorer and marauder De Soto came close to the Mobile River, but it is unknown if he ever actually traveled to the juncture of the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers where the Mobile River begins.

The first white colonists in Alabama landed on the shores of Mobile Bay in 1559 under the leadership of Tistan de Luna. He and one-thousand settlers, after landing at Mobile Bay, moved on to Pensacola Bay, and eventually returned to Alabama to take over the Indian town of Nanipacna. (Rivers of Alabama)
A Canadian born Frenchman, Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville would be the first European to leave a considerable mark on the history of Mobile. In the late 1600’s the French government were laying plans to settle and therefore claim the mouth of the Mississippi River. The Spanish, upon learning of plans for a permanent French settlement on the Gulf, quickly scrambled to occupy Pensacola Bay in 1698, denying the French port facilities where they could.
After Iberville’s first reconnaissance for a Mississippi settlement in 1699, he returned to the Gulf in 1702 and began the establishment of warehouses and port facilities on Mobile Bay’s Dauphin Island because of the presence of a deep water harbor, and the strategic importance of slowing the Spanish and English march across the eastern frontier towards the Mississippi River. (Futado)
They named the island, Massacre Island because of the presence of some sixty skeletons that were found upon landing there. Two years later in 1701 Dauphin Island became the first capital of the growing French colony of Louisiana. Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville was the first of the DeMoyne brothers to make his mark upon the history of Alabama. He established the first Mobile settlement in 1702, at a site upstream from Mobile Bay along the Tensaw River at 27-Mile Bluff. The settlement was named Mobile, and the fort that was its center was called Fort Louis (for their Grand Monarch and employer, King Louis the XIV). (History of Alabama
The introduction of hexagonal cells for mobile phone base stations, invented in 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T, was further developed by Bell Labs during the 1960s. Radiophones have a long and varied history going back to the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s, while hand-held cellular radio devices have been available since 1983. Due to their low establishment costs and rapid deployment, mobile phone networks have since spread rapidly throughout the world, outstripping the growth of fixed telephony.
In 1945, the 0G generation of mobile telephones were introduced. 0G mobile telephones, such as Mobile Telephone Service, were not officially categorized as mobile phones, since they did not support the automatic change of channel frequency in the middle of a call, when the user moved from one cell (base station coverage area) to another cell, a feature called "handover".

In 1970 Amos Joel of Bell Labs invented the "call handoff" feature, which allowed a mobile-phone user to travel through several cells during the same conversation. Martin Cooper of Motorola is widely considered to be the inventor of the first practical mobile phone for handheld use in a non-vehicle setting. Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973. At the time he made his call, Cooper was working as Motorola's General Manager of its Communications Division.