If you had the chance to make the first handheld cell phone call in history, who would you call? Our mom, our best friend, maybe. Motorola engineer Martin Cooper chose someone completely different on April 3, 1973: the man running the same race at a rival company.
This is one of the sweetest "look, I did it" moments in tech history. And it lets us remember the invention of the cell phone as a street scene rather than a lab report.
The call from the sidewalk
Cooper made the call from a sidewalk on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, near the Hilton hotel. Motorola's base station had been set up on the roof of the nearby Burlington House building. On the other end was Dr. Joel S. Engel, who worked at AT&T and had come from Bell Laboratories. Engel was Cooper's biggest rival. To grasp why this call was a first, it's enough to know who Engel was: Cooper was proving to his rival, for the first time and right in his ear, that a handheld phone was possible.
Cooper's opening line is quoted on Wikipedia like this: "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone."
Cooper made other calls at the time too. He says he also talked while crossing the street during a radio interview, and counts that among the most dangerous things he has ever done.
The 1.1-kilo brick
The device used in the call was a DynaTAC prototype. It weighed about 1.1 kg (2.5 pounds) and was 25 cm long. Most of the weight was the battery. The battery gave about 30 minutes of talk time, and recharging took about 10 hours.
Cooper is witty about this: "The battery lifetime wasn't really a problem because you couldn't hold that phone up for that long!"
From prototype to store: 10 years
The first call was made in 1973, but it took more than ten years before ordinary people could buy a cell phone. The commercial model DynaTAC 8000X was introduced on March 6, 1983 and received approval from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on September 21, 1983. The first public cellular network in the US also went live in 1983.
According to the DynaTAC page, mass production began in early 1984 and the phone cost $3,995. In today's money that's roughly $12,400. Talk time was still about 30 minutes, and charging again took about 10 hours.
Sources are a bit mixed on weight. The DynaTAC page gives 28 ounces (790 g) for the FCC-approved model, while elsewhere on the same page it says 2.5 pounds (about 1 kg). What's certain is that it weighed several times as much as today's phones.
The ten years in between weren't wasted. According to the DynaTAC page, several different prototypes were built between 1973 and 1983. In its 1973 announcement, Motorola expected users to pay between $60 and $100 a month. So the cell phone was conceived as an expensive luxury from day one. The $3,995 price tag in 1984 confirmed it: the first cell phone was priced out of reach for most people.
| The 1973 prototype | Today's smartphone |
|---|---|
| About 1.1 kg | Fits in a pocket, several times lighter |
| About 30 minutes of talk | Hours of use |
| About 10 hours of charging | Much shorter charging times |
| Voice calls only | Camera, internet, maps, payments |
Why did he call his rival?
Cooper's call to Engel was a show, but behind it was a serious race. Both companies wanted a say in the future of the cellular phone. Calling the rival with a handheld device over Motorola's own base station was the clearest way of saying "we did it".
Today we don't part with our phones for even a moment. That sidewalk moment in 1973 was when it was shown live, on the street, that the phone could belong not to a desk or a car but to a person's hand.
Who would you make your first cell phone call to: your rival or someone you love?