1973: Martin Cooper of Motorola uses the first portable handset ... to make the first cellphone call ... to his rival at Bell Labs. Rub it in.
If you wanted to make a mobile-phone call in those days, you might have a radiophone in your car. You'd need to spend thousands of dollars, stash about 30 pounds of equipment in your trunk and install a special antenna.
Bell Laboratories (then the research division of AT&T and now part of Alcatel-Lucent) had conceptualized cellular communications in 1947. But it was locked in a competition with Motorola in the '60s and '70s to go truly portable.
At Motorola, Cooper and designer Rudy Krolopp worked on the "shoe" phone, using many of the company's existing electronics patents. They produced the Motorola DynaTAC (for DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage): 9 inches tall, 2½ pounds, with 30 circuit boards. You could talk for 35 minutes, and it took 10 hours to recharge.
Cooper set up a cellular base station in New York and made his first call to Joel Engel, Bell Labs' research chief. Ouch.
Cooper recalls: "I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter -- probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life."
Motorola spent another 10 years to get the cellphone over technological and regulatory hurdles. Commercial service started in 1983, with a slimmed-down, 16-ounce DynaTAC. First adopters paid $3,500 for the phone ($7,400 in today's money). It was 1990 before cellphone service reached a million U.S. subscribers.
The world's lightest cellphone is now the Modu at just 1.41 ounces. The world's cheapest are free, if you sign a two-year service plan.
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