In 1865 the dentist Dr. Mahlon Loomis of Virginia may have been the first person to communicate wirelessly through the atmosphere.

Between 1866 and 1873 he transmitted telegraphic messages a distance of 18 miles between the tops of Cohocton Mountain and Beorse Deer Mountain, Virginia.  He was granted U.S. patent number 129,971 on July 30, 1872 for an "Improvement in Telegraphing," but for financial reasons did not proceed further with his system.

On November 22, 1875, while working on acoustical telegraphy, a science close to telephony, Thomas Alva Edison noticed unusual looking electro-magnetic sparks. Although unsure of what he was observing, Edison leapt to amazing, accurate conclusions. This etheric force as he named it, might replace wires and cables as a way to communicate.

From 1879 to 1886, London born David Hughes discovered radio waves but was told incorrectly that he had discovered no such thing. Discouraged, he pursued radio no further. But he did take the first mobile telephone call.

On February 22,1880 Alexander Graham Bell and his cousin Charles Bell communicated over the Photophone, a remarkable invention conceived of by Bell and executed by Sumner Tainter. This device transmitted voice over a light beam.

1889 - the first transportable phone documented is from 1889 - primarily for 'railroad and canal works, military purposes etc.'

from 1899 to 1902 LME [sold] a large number of transportable field telephones and so called cavalry telephones to South Africa during the Boer War

Ships were the first wireless mobile platforms.

In 1901 Marconi placed a radio aboard a Thornycroft steam powered truck, thus producing the first land based wireless mobile. (Transmitting data, of course, and not voice.)

From 1910 on it appears that Lars Magnus Ericsson and his wife Hilda regularly worked the first car telephone

In 1919 three firms came together to develop a wireless company that one day would reach around the world. Heavy equipment maker ASEA, boiler and gas equipment maker AGA, and telephone manufacturer LM Ericsson, formed SRA Radio, the forerunner of Ericsson's radio division. Svenska Radio Aktiebolaget, known simply as SRA, was formed to build radio receivers, broadcasting having just started in Scandinavia. (Aktiebolaget, by the way, is Swedish for a joint stock company or corporation.)

Until the 1920s, mobile radio communications mainly made use of Morse Code.

In the early 1920s, under the leadership of William P. Rutledge, the Commissioner of Detroit Police Department, Detroit, Michigan police carried out pioneering experiments to broadcast radio messages to receivers in police cars.

First land mobile radio telephone systems for police car dispatch

In 1921 the Detroit police department installed this system which was similar to the present day paging systems. It was one-way transmission only and the patrolmen had to stop at a wire-line telephone station to call back in.

On April 7, 1928, the first voice based radio mobile system went operational. Although the system was still one-way, its effectiveness was immediate and dramatic.

1924 - The first car mounted radio-telephone

Police and emergency services drove mobile radio pioneering, Bell Laboratories does claim inventing the first version of a mobile, two way, voice based radio.

On June 17, 1946 in Saint Louis, Missouri, AT&T and Southwestern Bell introduced the first American commercial mobile radio-telephone service to private customers.

On March 1, 1948 the first fully automatic radiotelephone service began operating in Richmond, Indiana, eliminating the operator to place most calls.

In 1969 Bell implemented commercial radio cellular.

On October 17, 1973, Motorola filed a patent entitled 'Radio telephone system.' – the first hand held cell phone.

By 1976 only 545 customers in New York City had Bell System mobiles, with 3,700 customers on the waiting list. Around the country 44,000 Bell subscribers had AT&T mobiles but 20,000 people sat on five to ten year waiting lists.  It took 37 years for cellular phones to go commercial from the time of the mobile phone’s introduction.

In July, 1978 Advanced Mobile Phone Service or AMPS started operating in North America. In AT&T labs in Newark, New Jersey, and most importantly in a trial around Chicago, Illinois Bell and AT&T jointly rolled out analog based cellular telephone service.

in 1981, when the Nordic Mobile Telephone System or NMT450 began operating in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway in the 450 MHz range. It was the first multinational cellular system.

In 1982 twenty-six European national phone companies began developing GSM

1985 – 1998 the American cellular phone industry grew from less than 204,000 subscribers in 1985 to 1,600,000 in 1988.

In the mid-1980s commercial mobile telephony took to the air. The North American terrestrial system or NATS was introduced by Airfone

In 1988 the analog networking cellular standard called TIA-IS-41 was published. This Interim Standard is still evolving.

In 1990 the first recommendations were published and in-flight radio-telephone moved to digital.