A simple tribute to Amos

A week after my birthday this year, Amos Joel passed away. Amos who? Now that I'm walking away from the cellphone industry particularly, it is a good time to pay tribute to the man who gave us the cellphone. While he did not exactly invent the cellphone, he did invent the device that allowed phones to shake wireless hands with different stations as they wander around. I researched about Amos for material to write and beheld this apt article on my search engine.

Thank you Amos; you changed the world yet they know you not. God bless you, now that you have returned home to Him.

The father of switching who connected the world
Friday Nov 7 2008 13:55 By Phil Davison Financial Times

When you make a call on your mobile phone today, tip your hat to Amos E. Joel Jr, the American electrical engineer who patented the idea of a cellular phone system in 1972 and who has died at the age of 90. It was he who invented the electronic switching device that allowed phone users to move from one "cell area" to another without losing their connection.

Although another American, Martin Cooper, is widely credited with "inventing" the mobile phone for Motorola in 1973, his first wireless handset relied on a single base tower, linked up with the landline system, and had limited range. Wireless phones would eventually work "on the move" as a result of the technology detailed in Joel's invention of the previous year, US patent number 3,663,762, titled "Mobile Communication System".

"Without his invention, there wouldn't be all these people walking around with cellphones," according to Frank Vigilante, who worked with Joel at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Bell initially hoped Joel's breakthrough might lead to 200,000 mobile phone users worldwide, something of an underestimate given the hundreds of millions of users today.

Although he was most renowned among his peers for that and other switching technology - he delighted in the label, "the father of switching" - it was only one of more than 70 patents held by Joel, a recent inductee into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. His designs for early digital computers and "cryptanalysis" machines played an important role for the allies during the second world war as part of what was codenamed Project X. After visiting Bell Labs, then in New York City, British computer pioneer Alan Turing incorporated some of Joel's ideas into the digital computer, Colossus, which helped crack Nazi codes.

Joel and his colleagues at Bell also designed a scrambler codenamed Sigsaly, which allowed Winston Churchill, from the Cabinet War Rooms in London, to have vital encrypted conversations with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US president, in Washington. The system's main terminal was so big that it had to be installed elsewhere, in the basement of Selfridge's department store on London's Oxford Street. Joel's role in the cryptography team is commemorated on a wall at the Bletchley Park museum, Buckinghamshire, the wartime code-breaking centre.

Half a century on, in 1994, the producers of the television mini-series, World War II: When Lions Roared, enlisted Joel to help design their reconstruction of the room where Churchill, played in the series by Bob Hoskins, co-ordinated the war effort with Roosevelt. "Dad was extremely proud of his contribution during world war two. He was quite aware of the impact his cryptography team had on the outcome of the war," said Stephanie, one of his twin daughters.

After the war, Joel designed technology that allowed direct long-distance dialling, without the traditional operator, and designed the world's first computerised billing system, known as AMA. His patent for the latter was the longest document ever registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office, running to more than 500 pages. His switching technology would later help create such advances as the call waiting service, caller ID and the locking code for touch-tone phones.

Amos Edward Joel Jr was born in Philadelphia on March 12 1918, the only child of a travelling menswear salesman and his wife. When he was 11, the family moved to New York City, where he lived on West 86th Street, Manhattan, and commuted to the DeWitt Clinton boys' high school in the Bronx. He learnt to read music and play clarinet and saxophone but was, he said, "always curious how things worked", such as the signals on his electric train set. When his parents got their first dial phone, he wrote to the local telephone company to ask how it worked. Receiving an inadequate answer, he worked it out himself and, aged 14, invented his own "Joel All-Relay Dial System" - connecting all his friends on West 86th Street with lines he put up between apartments.

He graduated in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in 1940 and master's in 1942, joining Bell after getting his BSc (He would remain there for 43 years, until his retirement in 1983, after which he was kept on as a consultant).

As a student, he developed a fascination for patents, collecting copies of them and using them as "wallpaper" on his dormitory wall. During an "open house" day, when visitors were allowed, he invited a fellow student, Rhoda Fenton, up to his dorm on a blind date "to see my patents". She assumed this was code for "something more interesting" but he was too engrossed in his patents to make any amorous move. He spent the evening explaining to her that "it takes all of that to give you a dial tone". Back at home, she told her father ,"this guy's crazy" but they were wed in 1942 and remained so for 58 years.

With the explosion of mobile phones in recent years, Joel was modest but proud, according to his daughters. "Especially after 9/11. He felt extremely proud that his creation was able to link people with their loved ones during the last moments of their lives," says Stephanie. He never felt the need to get a modern model but kept one of his prototypes, the size of a brick, in his car, using it mostly to order a pizza on his way home from work.

Joel never earned significant money from his cellular or other breakthroughs. "He invented not for the money, but for the betterment of humanity," says Stephanie. "He always wanted to use his mind to make the world a better place."

Joel died of heart failure at his home in Maplewood, New Jersey, on October 25. His wife died in 2000 and their son Jeffrey in 2003. He is survived by his daughters, Stephanie and Andrea.