Mobile phone technology is continuously evolving, seemingly at an accelerating rate of innovation and adoption. Examining the strides taken from 1G to 4G, the technology has both created new usage patterns and learned from unexpected use cases. Here's a brief history of mobile telephony. Early History of Mobile Technology In 1857, Clark Maxwell derived a theory of electromagnetic radiation, which Guglielmo Marconi used as a basis for the invention of radio transmission in 1901. This was a great achievement, however, it was unable to achieve reasonable data transmission rates for over a half-century. The first precursors to modern mobile telephony were introduced in the late 1940s in the United States and in the 1950s in Europe . These early "mobile" phones were heavily constrained by limited mobility and poor service. The devices were heavy and also extremely expensive. 1G: First Generation Cellular Phones In the 1970s, the First Generation, or 1G,