This year marks 50 years since the first mobile phone call took place. Marty Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, is remembered as the person who made the call.
In April 1973, Marty Cooper stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue in New York and took a phone out of his pocket.
Passersby stared at him as he dialed a number on the cream-colored phone. They had never seen anything like it.
What Marty Cooper did was revolutionary – he made the first wireless mobile phone call.
Called his rival
So who did he call during that very first call?
Well, to another engineer at rival company Bell Laboratories. Cooper told the rival that he was calling from a “personal, handheld, portable mobile phone” – and then it went silent on the other end.
“I think he was gritting his teeth,” says the now 94-year-old Marty Cooper to BBC News.
Wrong bet
Bell Laboratories had instead invested heavily in a phone that was connected to the car.
“Could you believe that? So we had been trapped in our homes and offices by this copper wire for over 100 years – and now they were going to trap us in our cars!” says Marty Cooper.
Motorola and Marty Cooper had taken a different path – which turned out to be right in time – then and now.
From big and heavy to small and slim
Much has changed over the years… The phone that Marty Cooper helped develop, and which was released in 1984, cost over $10,000 and weighed around 790 grams. That’s roughly four times the weight of an iPhone 14.
Phones have certainly changed over time: with Motorola’s first phone, you could only make calls, while today’s phones have many more features than that.
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