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 Bell Labs, owned by AT&T, over the phone.
Although the average consumer wouldn't have access to cell phones for another ten years, 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 supplanted by a host of faster and thinner phones that are now commonplace, changing entire businesses, societies, and our personal relationships.
While some may have been overwhelmed by the scale and impact of mobile 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 everyone has a cell phone, – said Cooper, now 95, in a recent interview with CNN. “Back then we used to tell a story that one day when you were born you would be assigned a phone number. If you don't answer the calls, you will die. After Cooper's first call, he said, manufacturing problems and government regulation slowed progress in bringing the phone to the general public.
It took a decade for the DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) version of the phone to ) appeared on the market, and it cost $3900. The phone, similar to the one Gordon Gekko had in the movie “Wall Street”, weighed 1.13 kg and was about 76 cm tall.
The modern mobile phone appeared only in the 1990s, when it was significantly reduced in size and became much more convenient to use. Today, 97% of Americans own a cell phone, according to a Pew Research Center study.
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.< /p>
Martin Cooper himself is an iPhone (and before that – Samsung) user, 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, talk on their mobile phones,”, – said Cooper 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.