The First Mobile Phone Call
Next: April 3, 2027
Call someone, just to talk.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of 3 April 1973, when Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, stood on Sixth Avenue in New York, next to the Hilton hotel, and made the first public call from a handheld mobile phone. Motorola was racing Bell Labs, which saw car phones as the future. Cooper took a paper phone book from his pocket and rang his rival there, Joel Engel, to tell him he was calling from 'a personal, handheld, portable cell phone'. Passers-by stared.
How it's celebrated
There is no formal observance, but newspapers, broadcasters and technology museums look back on the call, as they did with big features for its fiftieth anniversary in 2023. It is a good day to think about the device in your pocket, and perhaps to use it the old-fashioned way: ring someone you have not spoken to in a while, just to talk.
Did you know
- Cooper's prototype, nicknamed 'the brick', weighed about 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg) and was about ten inches tall.
- The commercial version, the DynaTAC 8000X, reached the market about a decade later and gave 30 minutes of talk time after 10 hours of charging.
- Japan opened the world's first commercial cellular service, in Tokyo in December 1979, but it was for car phones whose radio weighed about 7 kg and sat in the boot.
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