How are modern cellphones the technological descendants of the old military field phones?

You haven’t made the right connection.

Cell phone and satellite phones are different technology. The satellite phone uses one satellite as a relay just like the satellite TV broadcasts that were first seen on the news in the 1960s. Cell Phones are simple radios.

The patent you are talking about was U.S. patent, Patent Number 887357 for a wireless telephone, issued 1908 to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky for a wireless phone to be used in caves and mines. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the first cell phone networks using that old technology were established.

It took a few other key developments and those were patented as well to finally create the cell phone we know today. The Bell Labs created the “hand off” feature that allows you to switch between cell phone towers and Motorola is widely considered to be the inventor of the first practical mobile phone for handheld use in a non-vehicle setting.

The cell phone does not equal the phone that Radar used on MASH; that was an US Army Field Phone and it is connected by wires through a switchboard just like your land line phone. The Army Filed Phone is portable, but otherwise identical.

Cell Phones are actually small radios.

The technology that makes a cell phone work is the combination of the phone/short range radios and the towers.

A cell phone network is a series of towers that receive short range radio signals generated by cell phones. They then send those signals into the standard telephone system and if another cell phone is being called then the call is transmitted by a cell phone tower to the receiving cell phone.

The military did have radios and those radios are the ancestors of the cell phone. The difference between the two is the radio frequencies used. The Federal Communication Commission reserves certain radio frequencies for specific traffic. Airports, police, fire departments, the military and cell phones all have their own reserved frequencies that they use. They also have to share the radio spectrum with standard radio signals and TV signals who have their own reserved frequencies.

If you took a 1950s era phone and pulled all the wires out of the ground while keeping the phone lines connected then you would have the exact same system that Radar O’Riley used on the TV series MASH. When he turns the crank he is turning a generator that sends a signal down the line to ring the phone on the other end. When he talked with Sparky he was talking with the switchboard operator who would plug his line into another line to talk with I-Corp, Japan, or even stateside. It was a standard telephone system, not a cell phone.

According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_phone
“There is one U.S. patent, Patent Number 887357 for a wireless telephone, issued 1908 to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this to “cave radio” telephones and not directly to cellular telephony as we know it today. However, the introduction of cells for mobile phone base stations, invented in 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT