April 3, 1973, 50 years ago: The first call on a mobile telephone is made.
In 1954, Martin Cooper went to work as a senior development engineer in the mobile equipment group at Motorola, Inc. He developed products like the 1st cellular-like portable handheld police radio system, made for the Chicago Police Department in 1967.
Cooper was made the head of Motorola's communications systems division. He knew that Bell Labs had been producing telephones for cars since 1947, but they required 30 pounds of equipment in the car's trunk. Why couldn't there be a cordless telephone that a person could carry with them? A mobile phone, which he thought of as being similar to the wrist radio worn by Dick Tracy in the comic strips. Although, when he explained the idea, people thought it sounded more like the flip-open communicators on Star Trek.
It took 90 days to design, build and test the DynaTAC 8000x -- for "Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage." It weight 2 1/2 pounds and was 10 inches long, and was nicknamed "the brick." It had a battery, which itself weighed several times as much as the smartphones of half a century later. The battery allowed 30 minutes of talk time before requiring a recharge of 10 hours. But Cooper explained: "The battery lifetime wasn't really a problem, because you couldn't hold the phone up for that long!"
On April 3, 1973, outside at the New York City Hilton at 1335 6th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, Cooper and John Francis Mitchell, Motorola's Chief of Portal Communications Products (and thus Cooper's boss), conducted a press conference to publicly demonstrate their product for the 1st time. Cooper made the call, which connected him to a base station installed on the roof of the Burlington House at 1345 6th Avenue, and into the American Telephone & Telegraph land-line telephone system.
Naturally, he called Joel Engel, his chief competitor, who just so happened to be trying to develop such a phone for AT&T: "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone." It wasn't as dramatic as Alexander Graham Bell's shout of "Watson! Come here! I want you!" in Boston 97 years earlier. But it was one of the great trollings of all time.
With this success, Motorola invested $100 million in the phone's development. Within 10 years, the handset was reduced to half its original weight. In 1996, Motorola introduced the StarTAC, the first "flip phone," which made mobile phones as accessible to people as the Ford Model T made automobiles affordable.
By the time Mitchell died in 2009, pretty much anybody who wanted a mobile phone had one that could, all at the same time, serve as a computer, a calculator, a calendar, a notepad, a library, a radio, a video camera, a flashlight, a bill-paying system, a ticket broker, and, oh yeah, a telephone; and could fit in your pocket. Such a device was a far cry not just from the "brick" that Cooper and Mitchell invented in 1973, or even their first really practical one from 1983, but from the Apple IIe and Commodore 64 personal computers available at that time.
As of April 3, 2023, Marty Cooper is still alive.