First Mobile Phone Call
Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first handheld mobile phone call
April 03, 1973
A Call That Changed Communication
On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper stood on a street corner in New York City and made the world's first call from a handheld mobile phone. He called his rival at AT&T's Bell Labs — the team competing to develop the same technology — to tell them he was calling from a mobile phone. The device Cooper used, the Motorola DynaTAC prototype, weighed about 2.5 pounds and was 9 inches long. It offered only 30 minutes of talk time before needing to be recharged for ten hours. Cooper has described the reactions of passersby as ranging from astonishment to disbelief.
From Brick to Smartphone
It took ten years of development and regulatory approval before the first commercial mobile phone became available to the public. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X went on sale in the United States in 1983, priced at $3,995 — about $12,000 in today's money. Through the 1980s and 1990s, mobile phones shrank, became cheaper, and gained new features. The introduction of SMS text messaging in the early 1990s opened an entirely new mode of communication. By the late 1990s, mobile phones had spread to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, particularly in countries that had limited landline infrastructure.
The Smartphone Revolution
Apple's introduction of the iPhone in 2007 transformed mobile phones into pocket computers. Today there are more mobile phone subscriptions than people on Earth. Smartphones have reshaped commerce, news, social relationships, navigation, photography, and banking. They have given billions of people access to information that would have required a library a generation ago. The implications — positive and negative — continue to unfold. The journey from Cooper's 2.5-pound prototype to today's devices took just fifty years. See how long that is with our date calculator.