The world’s first cell phone? Made in Italy in 1935!

In the collective imagination, the invention of mobile phones is tied to the booming consumer culture of the 1980s. But long before the Motorola DynaTAC or the first brick-sized handsets made headlines, an Italian engineer had already envisioned – and built – the first portable phone. In the mid-1930s, Domenico Mastini developed what can rightly be...