Image: APA/AFP/VALERIE MACON
“Joel, this is Martin Cooper. I am calling you here from a mobile phone. But from a real mobile phone that you can hold in your hand.” History was made with this telephone conversation on April 3, 1973. The American engineer Martin Cooper was standing on Sixth Avenue in New York when he made the first call with a mobile phone 50 years ago.
The device was not handy with its weight of around one kilo, and the battery only lasted 25 minutes. But you couldn’t have held the heavy phone to your ear for that long anyway, remembers the now 94-year-old Cooper on the occasion of the cell phone’s 50th birthday, which the cell phone celebrated on Monday.
Telephone call with competitor
In the middle of New York, Cooper, who had developed the mobile phone with his colleagues from Motorola, put it to the test. He dialed the number of Joel Engel, a competitor who was also developing a mobile phone.
He was probably surprised by the call and the breakthrough of the competition, because there was silence on the other end of the line. “I think he gritted his teeth”, Cooper recalls. The engineer and his team had started work on the mobile phone in 1972. The end of March 1973 was the new type of telephone “DynaTAC” – in approximately “Dynamically adjusted system” – complete.
After the historic phone call, it was another ten years before Motorola was able to launch an improved version in the US. Priced at around $4000, that was it “DynaTAC 8000X” however, not a mass-produced product. With a weight of almost a kilo and a length of 33 centimeters, it earned the nickname “Brick” (brick).
Smartphones now fit in your pocket. Martin Cooper believes mobile phones make people’s lives better. But one thing bothers him: “The problem with cell phones is that people stare at their screens too much.” It gets to him to watch someone check their phone while crossing the street. “That’s insane”the 94-year-old told the AFP news agency.
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