<P> While the transmission of speech by radio has a long history, the first models that were wireless, mobile, and also capable of connecting to the standard telephone network are much more recent . The first such devices were barely portable compared to today's compact hand - held devices, and their use was clumsy . </P> <P> Along with the process of developing a more portable technology, and a better interconnections system, drastic changes have taken place in both the networking of wireless communication and the prevalence of its use, with smartphones becoming common globally and a growing proportion of Internet access now done via mobile broadband . </P> <P> Before the devices existed that are now referred to as mobile phones or cell phones, there were some precursors . In 1908, a Professor Albert Jahnke and the Oakland Transcontinental Aerial Telephone and Power Company claimed to have developed a wireless telephone . They were accused of fraud and the charge was then dropped, but they do not seem to have proceeded with production . Beginning in 1918, the German railroad system tested wireless telephony on military trains between Berlin and Zossen . In 1924, public trials started with telephone connection on trains between Berlin and Hamburg . In 1925, the company Zugtelephonie AG was founded to supply train telephony equipment and, in 1926, telephone service in trains of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the German mail service on the route between Hamburg and Berlin was approved and offered to first - class travelers . </P> <P> Fiction anticipated the development of real world mobile telephones . In 1906, the English caricaturist Lewis Baumer published a cartoon in Punch magazine entitled "Forecasts for 1907" in which he showed a man and a woman in London's Hyde Park each separately engaged in gambling and dating on wireless telephony equipment . Then, in 1926, the artist Karl Arnold created a visionary cartoon about the use of mobile phones in the street, in the picture "wireless telephony", published in the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus . </P>

When did the first portable phone come out