Black History Month: Celebrating African American Telephony Inventors and Innovators – Jesse Russell

Alvaria and our global employees are proud to celebrate Black History Month and the African American contributors to the field of telephony. 

In part four of our survey of underappreciated African American inventors, we are taking a look at an individual that made it possible to use small devices for communication from nearly any point on earth, much more cost-effectively than ever before.

Previously, local and long-distance communications required significant infrastructure, were very costly to the consumer – and at one point in history required a connection between many telephone switchboard operators to make a call from Chicago to New York. Before even that, calls took place on party lines, which were circuits of telephone lines, meaning your entire neighborhood may know what was said if they happened to pick up the phone during your call!

The evolution of telephony to our current status can be attributed to today’s inventor, but we rarely hear his name, despite this major contribution. Like several of the preceding inventors we have featured for Black History Month, this inventor worked at Bell Laboratories and has many patents and honors to his name.

Jesse Russell has played a fundamental role in bringing the modern cell phone to life. Russell changed the wireless communication industry with inventions like the first digital cellular base station, a mobile data telephone patent, and several wireless communication patents. 

An employee at Bell Labs, Russell was one of the first to recognize the potential for mobile phones. By 1988, Bell Labs had created the first digital cellular system, with his help. While no single person is credited with inventing the cell phone, Russell's innovations greatly contributed to the evolution of the cellphone, especially smartphones, as he holds the patent for the mobile data phone and the wireless base station. The original wireless base station, invented by Russell in 1990, allows data to be transmitted and amplified between radio towers and eventually to mobile devices. He later expanded its use to include ATM units, broadband networks and call waiting systems. All of this made the smartphone we use today possible. 

After 30 years in the industry, Russell holds over 100 patents. His work has reshaped the way we communicate – and he has won numerous accolades for it including U.S. Black Engineer of the Year, America's New Leadership Class Award, Outstanding Service Award, Outstanding Scientist Award, and Scientist of the Year Award. He is an International Engineering Consortium (IEC) Fellow, an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) fellow, and he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.

In our final article of this series, we will learn more about the first African American woman to receive a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who through her work in physics revolutionized telephones alongside Jesse Russell, making phones more user-friendly and usable from your home.