It has become common practice in the West to set dates as key events in history, as if they were the genesis of previously unheard-of processes. For example, for the invention of the cell phone, April 3, 1973 holds such a position. It was on this day that Martin Cooper, an electrical engineer working for the Motorola, made what is considered the first call on a cell phone. But not before calling a press conference. Now, was this really the first device built for such a function? What if cell phone technology had been consolidated earlier by the Soviet regime?

Some answers seem well documented in this regard. During the Soviet Union, Moscow radio engineer Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich (1929-1994) produced a device very close to what we might call a cell phone today. In its most sophisticated version, that of 1961, the LK-1 could fit in the palm of the hand, covered a radius of 80 km and provided a battery life of 20 to 30 hours – much longer than the Dynatac, which could hold a conversation for 30 minutes.

The Bolshevik bureaucracy would eventually prioritize research into mobile phones for cars over Kupriyanovich's device, but the inventor's avant-garde production was recorded enough to arouse curiosity to this day. We try to understand the mystery: where it came from, how the device worked and, finally, why it didn't work.

CDMA Technology: The Starting Point

The first milestone in mobile telephony research in the Soviet Union was in 1935, when scientist and professor Dimitriy Vasiliyevich Ageev (1911-1997) defended a dissertation on code division radio reception. Entitled “Methods for Treating Noise in Radio Reception,” the article, presented at the Leningrad Institute of Electrotechnical Communications, described the basic procedures for what later became known as CDMA technology.

This type of technology was very common in cell phones until the 2000s – to give you an idea, it was one of the standards used by Vivo in Brazil until 2008. An acronym for “Code Division Multiple Access”, it worked as a method of accessing channels by sharing frequencies. What does this mean? Basically, each user within the network scheme was given a specific code, which was translated only by the receiver.

To avoid interference and protect user privacy, the CDMA network (which we can classify as a 2G standard) used a spread spectrum method, in which the bandwidth used for transmission was much larger than that needed to transmit information. This allowed data sharing to be faster and more secure.

Two decades later, in 1957, the same technology was then used by the young Kupriyanovich for an experimental model of a mobile phone (let's call it that, since the concept of a cell phone did not exist at the time). In its entry-level version, the LK-1, which also had a base station design, weighed about three kilos and covered a distance of 20 to 30 km, with a battery autonomy of 20 to 30 hours.

The epic of Kupriyanovich

A graduate of Moscow Technical University with a degree in radio electronics, Kupriyanovich worked for several years at LK-1 as an amateur engineer. The operation was so secret that his family only learned about the place of work in the 1960s. His first mobile devices, then called “radiophones,” had poor coverage and were not very compact.

It was after registering a patent for the cell phone in November 1957 that the Soviet man began working on adaptations for the new device. The following year, he produced a prototype weighing just 500 grams; in 1961, the size was reduced to 70, and it could now be used by the city's telephone exchanges. An image of this latest version of the LK-1 is curious, as it closely resembles a contemporary smartphone – replace the dial panel with a front-facing camera and what you get is not far from a Nokia from the 2000s. The inventor also published, between 1957 and 1958, two articles in the magazine “Yunyy Tekhnik” on the basic operating principles and electrical circuitry of the cell phone, the latter answering readers' questions.

Kupriyanovich went so far as to detail how communication via “radiophone” would work in an interview with APN, the official press agency of the Soviet government. In the scheme, a radiotelephone base station (ATR, in Russian) would be installed in an automatic telephone exchange (ATC) in a given city, following the radiophone–ATR/ATC–telephone path. From the radiophone call to the station, the signal would be sent to the telephone exchange, which would encode the pulse into a regular call. With this, Kupriyanovich hoped that communication would be possible very close to what we have today with 4G devices: that is, calls could be made from anywhere, on an airplane, in a car, at sea or in the middle of a forest.

“A city like Moscow only needs ten automatic radio stations to have radio and telephone communication,” said the engineer at the time of the interview, in December 1961.

The Bolshevik government was paying attention and made a mini-documentary, “The Radiotelephone of Engineer Kupriyanovich”, about the project to newsreel science and technology officer in March 1958 (some sources also say 1959). The Russian-language video – which mixes real and staged footage – can be seen below. Unfortunately, there are no Portuguese or English subtitles.

What went wrong

After 1961, Kupriyanovich's name was never mentioned again in the Soviet press. It is known that in 1965, a Bulgarian company called Radioelectronica based itself on the LK-1 design to build a mobile telephone with a base station for 15 subscribers. A year later, the same company built a more extensive system for the models, which were given the names RAT-0.5 and ATRT-0.5. The system would be used by communications departments in the construction industry until the 1990s.

The Soviet Union, for its part, began a nationwide civilian mobile phone service in 1958, a year after the LK-1 was launched. Based on the Soviet MRT-1327 standard, the Altai weighed 11 pounds and was exclusively for automobiles, usually installed in the trunks of high-end vehicles.

The main developers of Altai were VNIIS (Voronezh Scientific Research Institute of Communications) and GSPI (State Specialized Projects Institute). The service first started in Moscow in 1963, but seven years later it was already available in 30 cities of the USSR.

We do not know why Kupriyanovich abandoned his invention, which some consider to be the first cell phone in history. From the late 1960s onwards, he devoted himself to creating medical equipment, including a device for controlling sleep and wakefulness. He published several articles on memory and hypnopaedia and died in 1994.