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Marty Cooper with the phone he used to make the historic first call
Exactly 50 years ago, on April 3, 1973, the first ever call was made on a mobile phone. The device had Motorola engineer Marty Cooper – and he called not to anyone, but to his main competitor – Joel Engel, an employee of Bell Laboratories, who led developments in the same direction.
Cooper, now 94, told the BBC that he walked to the corner of Sixth Avenue in New York that day and took his notebook out of his pocket. In it, he found the desired phone number and began to press the buttons on a large cream-colored device, which he put to his ear, catching the puzzled looks of passers-by.
“I told him, ‘Joel, I’m calling you on my cell phone, a real cell phone – a personal portable device. There was silence on the other end of the line. I think all he could do was grind his teeth,” Cooper recalls with a laugh.
The fact is that Bell Laboratories then developed a mobile phone that was supposed to work only in a car. “Can you imagine? Because of some copper wire, we have been unable to leave our homes and offices for more than 100 years. And now they want us to be unable to get out of our cars!” says the engineer.
Motorola decided to take a different path – and history has shown that this path turned out to be the right one.
However, today’s mobile phones, of course, are very different from the device that Cooper used in 1973. The consumer version of this phone, Motorola Dynatac 8000X, was released to the market only 11 years later, in 1984.
Expensive and heavy
The consumer version of Motorola’s first mobile phone is now in the collection of the Mobile Phone Museum
Of course, it had much fewer functions than any modern phone. “In fact, you could only dial a number and call,” says Wood. centimeter antenna.
The weight of such a phone was as much as 790 grams – almost four times heavier than, say, the iPhone 14 with its weight of 172 grams.
However, Marty Cooper is not too happy with the design of mobile phones in 2023. Although he admits that he could not have imagined how far this technology would go, turning phones into supercomputers with cameras and Internet access.
“I think today’s phone is not optimal. In many ways it’s just not a very good device,” says the engineer. all the beautiful things he can do, you have to find the app first.”
According to Cooper, in the future, artificial intelligence will be able to find or even develop apps depending on the needs of the owner. The engineer also believes that phones will be able to more accurately monitor people’s health, increase efficiency and, in general, significantly improve the quality of our lives.
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