360The first call from a handheld mobile phone
On 3 April 1973, Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, made the first public call from a handheld mobile phone, on a street in New York. He called a rival at Bell Labs. The prototype weighed about 1.1 kg and its battery lasted about 20 minutes. Ten years later, the first handheld mobile phone went on sale.
In the early 1970s, mobile telephones existed only in cars, with heavy equipment in the boot. Motorola wanted to show that a phone could belong to a person, not a car.
Martin Cooper's team built the DynaTAC prototype in a few months. On 3 April 1973, on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, he called Joel Engel, who led the rival car-phone project at Bell Labs, to tell him he was speaking from a handheld phone.
The phone was about 25 cm tall. It took ten hours to charge and allowed about 20 minutes of talk.
The first commercial version, the DynaTAC 8000X, went on sale in the United States in 1983 for about $4,000. Today there are more mobile phone subscriptions than people on Earth.
- 3 April 1973
- The first handheld mobile call
- 1979
- The first automated cellular network launches in Japan
- 1983
- The DynaTAC 8000X goes on sale
- 2007
- The iPhone is introduced
Sources: Motorola · Britannica · Science Museum Group.