Mobile Phone turns 40 years old today
On April 3rd, 1973 – 40 years from today, The first Mobile Phone call made by Marty Cooper a employee of Motorola Company.
Motorola engineer Marty Cooper placed the first public call from a cellphone. In midtown Manhattan, Cooper called Joel Engel — head of rival research department Bell Labs — saying “Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone.” The call was placed on a Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, which weighed 2.5 pounds, a far cry from today’s 4-ounce handsets.
Martin Cooper, is now 85-years-old and is called the “father” of the cellphone. The first cellphones to hit the market, in 1983, were priced at a colossal $3,500. Cooper felt that the cost and the huge size of the phones, would stop the them being further developed for the mass market. How wrong he was.