The First Mobile Phone Call: New York, 1973
1973 · event
On 3 April 1973 a man stood on a pavement on Sixth Avenue in New York, took a large white handset out of a bag and made a telephone call while walking. Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, rang the head of the rival research team at Bell Laboratories to tell him that he was speaking on a portable cellular telephone. It was the first call of its kind, and the choice of person to ring was not accidental.
The prototype was called the DynaTAC. It weighed a little over a kilogram, was about twenty five centimetres long without the aerial, gave around half an hour of talking and then needed ten hours on charge. Motorola had built it in a hurry, in a few months, to make a point in a regulatory argument. Bell was pushing a system based on telephones fitted into cars, and Cooper's team wanted to demonstrate that the future belonged to a telephone attached to a person rather than to a vehicle.
Ten years passed before a commercial version reached the shops. The DynaTAC 8000X went on sale in 1983 at a price of nearly four thousand dollars, and it was still a luxury item carried by a small number of people. Networks grew, handsets shrank, and by the middle of the 1990s the mobile phone had become ordinary in much of the world.
There are now more mobile subscriptions on Earth than there are people, and for a large part of the population the telephone is the only computer they own and the main route to banking, health information and work. The first call took place while its maker was walking down a street, being watched by passers by who had no idea what they were looking at.