Motorola’s Marty Cooper made the first call from a handheld mobile phone (distinct from car phones) to Joel S. Engel, a rival at Bell Labs, on April 3, 1973. Bell Labs had envisioned such technology as early as the late 1940s and, by Cooper’s own admission, he couldn’t help but playfully rub the monumental moment in a bit.

Cooper made the call during an interview with reporters located near a 900-MHz base station on 6th Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets in New York, to Bell Labs’ New Jersey headquarters (see a 2007 photo of Cooper below).

The call was made on a prototype of the DynaTAC (dynamic adaptive total area coverage) 8000X, which, 10 years later, would become the first such phone to be commercially released. In 1973, it weighed 1.1 kg and measured 22.86 cm long, 12.7 cm deep, and 4.44 cm wide.

The prototype offered a talk time of about 20 minutes and took 10 hours to recharge. Cooper was not concerned about the limited talk time as it would be difficult to hold something of that weight and size to an ear for more than 20 minutes.

Cooper, an engineer and executive at Motorola at the time, played an important role in the development of mobile phones. His belief was that a cellular phone should be “something that would represent an individual so you could assign a number — not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home — but to a person.”

Motorola management was supportive of Cooper’s mobile phone concept and invested $100 million between 1973 and 1993 before any revenues were realized. The company produced the below promotional video on the possibilities of personal cellular phones in 1980.

Forty years to the day after this call was made, Cooper was named the 2013 Marconi Prize recipient on April 3, 2013.

The number of mobile phone users is expected to reach 5 billion in 2019, with 67 percent of the world’s population owning a mobile phone.



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Editor’s note: This article was originally posted on April 3, 2013 and edited on April 3, 2019.