On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, made the first-ever cell phone call from a sidewalk on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan using a device the size of a brick.
“I’m calling you on a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a personal, pocket, portable cell phone,” Cooper told Joel Engel, head of AT&T-owned Bell Labs, over the phone.
Although the average consumer wouldn’t have access to cell phones for another decade, anyone who passed Cooper on the street that day could have witnessed history being made.
In the five decades since that first conversation, Cooper’s big, heavy gadget has changed and been replaced by a host of faster and thinner phones that are now commonplace, changing entire businesses, societies and our relationships.
While some may have been overwhelmed by the scale and impact of cell phones, Cooper argues that there was always the possibility that a significant portion of humanity would eventually find them a necessity.
“I wasn’t surprised that everybody has a cell phone,” Cooper, now 95, told CNN recently. “Back then, we used to tell a story that one day, when you are born, you will be assigned a phone number. If you don’t answer the calls, you will die.” Since Cooper’s first call, he says, manufacturing problems and government regulation have slowed progress in bringing the phone to the public.
It took a decade for the DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) version of the phone to hit the market, and it cost $3,900. The phone, similar to the one Gordon Gekko had in the film “Wall Street”, weighed 1.13 kg and was about 76 cm tall.
The modern mobile phone appeared only in the 1990s when it significantly decreased in size and became much more convenient to use. Today, 97% of Americans own a cell phone, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.
In the years since that first call, Cooper has written a book about the transformative power of the cell phone, founded companies, given speeches and appeared in the media.
Martin Cooper himself is an iPhone user (and before that a Samsung one), he likes to use his Apple Watch to track his swimming activity and connect his hearing aids to his phone.
“I am an optimist. I know cell phones have their flaws. We have people who become addicted to it. We have people who, crossing the street, are talking on their cell phones,” Cooper said in an interview with CNN. “Overall, I think the mobile phone has changed humanity for the better, and it will continue to do so in the future.”
Read also:
- An insider released the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra teasers
- Motorola Moto Buds 120 TWS Earbuds Review: High Autonomy and Powerful Sound