World's first "mobile" phone celebrates 100th birthday

History has forgotten Nathan Stubblefield, but thanks to the arrival of the 100th anniversary of his then-pioneering invention, the man finally is receiving his due.

In 1908, Stubblefield had the idea to use a complicated rig of wire and large poles set up around a train track, road, or river. When a train, vehicle, or boat traveled past the wires, a transmitting device on the vehicle would send an audio signal to a receiving device in the distance using magnetic waves.

A patent was granted for the device on May 9 of that year, which some are now crediting as the first wireless communications device ever. To wit, Virgin Mobile is honoring Stubblefield on the centennial of the patent with a set of web pages about the man. (Click through the photo gallery to get a better idea of how such a device worked. It's really pretty fascinating.)

Unfortunately, Stubblefield's invention wasn't entirely practical. The transmitter and receiver were enormous and far from portable (see picture), and they required so much wire that it would have been considerably more efficient to simply run the wire between the two transmitters instead of using wireless communications.

Still, it's nice to remember Stubblefield as a pioneer in a field that, at the time, few felt would have much of a future. History has of course shown that Stubblefield was on to something bigger than he knew: Harris Interactive's latest poll shows that 14 percent of adults use a cell phone exclusively at home now, sans land line.