On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper made a cell phone call while walking down the sidewalks of New York. These days, that wouldn’t be unusual. At the time, it was amazing. It was the first call ever made with a handheld cell phone.
Mr. Cooper worked for a small electronics company called Motorola. Motorola mainly made radio products. But in the 1970s, Motorola was working on a cell phone system. A huge company called AT&T was also working to create a cell phone system.
But Mr. Cooper didn’t think that Motorola’s current system was good enough. And he wasn’t a fan of AT&T’s idea that cell phones could only be used in cars. He wanted to make a cell phone that people could use anywhere. “Portable means freedom,” he said.
(Source: Redrum0486 [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.)
So Mr. Cooper and his team got to work. It took them just 90 days to design and create the first cell phone. It was a big, heavy thing, put together by hand.
Officially, the phone was called DynaTAC, which stood for “Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage”. But most people called it “The Brick” because it was so heavy. It weighed 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilograms).
Once the phone was finished, Mr. Cooper wanted to show it off to reporters. To show that the phone could really be used anywhere, he stepped outside to make his call. Who did he call? He call Dr. Joel Engel, who was in charge of AT&T’s cell phone program.
(Source: Rico Shen [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.)
After the two said hello, Mr. Cooper says he told Dr. Engel, “I’m calling you from a cell phone. A real cell phone. A personal, handheld, portable cell phone.” Mr. Cooper reports that, “There was silence on the other end of the line.” Dr. Engels says he doesn’t remember the call.
Though that call was just the start of something huge, everything didn’t change right away. It took Motorola over ten years to create a version of the DynaTAC that people could buy.
In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000X went on sale for around $4,000. Like the original phone, it was big and heavy. It took 10 hours to charge the phone, and you could only talk on it for about 30 minutes. Mr. Cooper later joked that the short battery life didn’t matter “because you couldn’t hold that phone up for that long!”
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Cell phones have changed a lot since Mr. Cooper made that first call. Now, they’re much smaller and can do many more things. Mr. Cooper, who’s now 94, thinks cell phones can still get better. He believes that one day, our phones might be tiny devices inside our ears.
Cell phones have changed a lot since Mr. Cooper made that first call. Now, they’re much smaller and can do many more things, like take pictures, play games, and search the internet. Mr. Cooper, who’s now 94, is impressed by the things cell phones can do today, but he thinks they can still get better. He believes that one day, our phones might be tiny devices inside our ears.
The success of Mr. Cooper and his team was built on the work of many other scientists and inventors before them. Mr. Cooper didn’t create the larger cell system that allowed his phone to work. But he did have the dream of building a personal, handheld phone. And that dream has changed the world.
Did You Know…?
Today there are more than twice as many cell phones on the planet as there are people. In the US alone, 97% of adults have a cell phone.