How Does a Cell Phone Work? 📱

Morning iPhone!

Hang on.

The iPhone was more powerful than the computers used to land us on the moon…

In other words…

And that was iPhone 1.

We’re on 15.

So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, how does a cell phone even work??

Well, imagine you’re calling a friend.

Stop. Look.

When you say ‘you’ into a phone,

The microphone inside captures your voice and converts it into something a machine can read:

Binary code – 1s and 0s.

Then it packages that code up into a radio wave:

And shoots the radio wave out the antenna of your phone over to your friend!

Ya. Slight problem with that.

Your phone’s small antenna isn’t powerful enough to send your signal anywhere meaningfully far away.

So we need cell towers.

These beasts are set up in huge hexagons on Earth – the most efficient shape for boosting and sending circular signals without any gaps or overlaps.

So when your phone beams out your call to a nearby tower,

It gets passed from tower to tower,

Until it hits your destination!

Stay Cute,
Henry & Dylan 🌈

If you’re that sexy friend, subscribe here.