On April 3, 1973, New York City residents unexpectedly witnessed a historic moment in the evolution of telecommunications on the city's busy streets. A man was talking on a portable telephone while crossing Manhattan surrounded by reporters. It was Motorola engineer Martin Cooper making the first call from a cell phone.

Bell Laboratories, part of the largest American telecommunications company, AT&T (American Telegram & Telephone), had introduced the idea of mobile telephony in 1947, but the battery of the device was so bulky, weighing 12 pounds, that it could only be carried by car. Martin Cooper worked for Motorola which, as the name suggests, was a company that supplied radios to Chicago police cars. The competition between the two companies for leadership in mobile telephony was fierce. Cooper was inspired to create a phone that would represent a person, not a place, office or home, but a “personal phone”.

After years of research, Cooper and his team built the Motorola Dyna TAC 8000X, which weighed about a kilogram, was 25 centimeters long, had a talk time of 30 minutes and a battery that charged in 10 hours. It was called “the brick”. With this device, on April 3, 1973, Cooper called his competitor, Joel Engel, at Bell Labs: "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real, portable cell phone."

Cooper had called reporters so they could capture the moment of his triumph. However, it took 10 years for this mobile phone to be released on the market and become commercially available. It cost $3,995 , few could get their hands on it and it became a lifestyle symbol for wealthy professionals. The advent of cellular network and digital technology in the early 1990s, namely 2G, made the mobile phone available to the general public and was the harbinger of the great transformation of human communication.

This revolution, which is still in progress, began today, on 3 April 1973.

Photo:

Martin Cooper with the first mobile phone, the Motorola Dyna TAC 8000X