50 years ago today, he made the first cell phone call

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Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellphone.(Sandy Huffaker/The New York Times/Redux via CNN) 

By Jennifer Korn | CNN

On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper stood on a sidewalk on sixth avenue in Manhattan with a device the size of a brick and made the first public call from a cell phone to one of the men he’d been competing with to develop the device.

“I’m calling you on a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a personal, handheld, portable cell phone,” Cooper, then an engineer at Motorola, said on the phone to Joel Engel, head of AT&T-owned Bell Labs.

While cell phones would not be available to the average consumer for another decade, anyone walking by Cooper on the street that day could have seen history being made.

In the fifty years since that first call, Cooper’s bulky device has evolved and been replaced by a wide range of thinner, faster phones that are now ubiquitous and reshaping industries, culture and the way we relate to one another and ourselves. But while the vast reach and impact of cell phones may have caught some off guard, Cooper said the possibility that mobile phones would one day be deemed essential to much of mankind was clear from the start.

“I was not surprised that everybody has a cell phone,” Cooper, now 94, told CNN. “We used to tell the story then that someday when you’re born you would be assigned a phone number. If you didn’t answer the phone, you would die.”

The rise of the cell phone

For months before that first call, Motorola was racing to build a cell phone against Bell Labs, the legendary research arm of AT&T that had developed the transistor and other innovations.

“They were the biggest company in the world, and we were a little company in Chicago,” Cooper recalled. “They just didn’t think we were very important.”

As he recalls it, his rival wasn’t quite as excited to get the call as Cooper was to call him.

“You could tell I was not averse to rubbing his nose in this thing. He was polite to me,” Cooper told CNN. “To this day, Joel does not remember that phone call, and I guess I don’t blame him.” (CNN was unable to contact Engel.)

After Cooper’s first call, manufacturing issues and government regulation slowed the progress bringing the phone to the public, he said. For example, Cooper recalls the Federal Communications Commission, an agency at which he now serves as an adviser, struggling to sort out how to split up radio channels to ensure competition.

It would take a decade for a version of that DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) phone to hit the market, for a hefty $3,900. The phone, similar to the one Gordon Gekko wielded in the movie “Wall Street,” weighed 2.5 pounds and was about a foot tall.

Compare that to the iPhone 14, which weighs 6 ounces and is just under six inches, or to any number of Android budget smartphones that cost $200-$300.

Motorola vice president John F. Mitchell shows how easily company's newest product-Dyna T-A-C Portable Radio Telephone System can be used in New York, on April 03, 1973.(Bettmann/Getty Images)
Motorola vice president John F. Mitchell shows how easily company’s newest product-Dyna T-A-C Portable Radio Telephone System can be used in New York, on April 03, 1973.(Bettmann/Getty Images) 

“Trying to improve the human experience”

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the modern cell phone took off, as it shrunk way down in size and became much more user friendly. Today, 97% of Americans own a cell phone of some kind, according to a 2021 study by Pew Research Center.

In the years since that first call, Cooper has written a book on the transformational power of the cell phone, started companies and done speaking tours and media appearances. But he doesn’t necessarily embrace every aspect of modern tech advancements.



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