On April 3, 2023, the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of the inaugural mobile phone call that was made by Marty Cooper, an engineer at Motorola.
In a memorable moment, Cooper stood on a street corner of Sixth Avenue in New York, dialed a number into a large, cream-colored device, and held it to his ear while onlookers gawked at him. The call was placed to his counterpart at Bell Laboratories, a rival company, where Cooper proudly announced that he was speaking from “a personal, handheld, portable cell phone.” Today, Cooper is 94 years old and recollects that the other end of the line was silent.
Around that time, Bell Laboratories was focused on developing a vehicle phone, but Cooper and Motorola believed that this method was not the way ahead. They predicted that portable, handheld, personal cell phones will be the norm in the future, and events have validated their prognosis.
The principles of how the initial call operated have remained mostly unchanged. The phone converts the user’s speech into an electrical signal, which is then used to modulate a radio wave. The radio wave travels to a mast, where it is sent to the intended receiver. The recipient can hear the speaker’s voice by reversing this process.
The commercial version of Cooper’s prototype, the Motorola Dynatac 8000X, was made available for purchase in 1984, 11 years after the first mobile phone call. It was a bulky device and would cost approximately £9,500 ($11,700) if purchased today.
The sources for this piece include an article in BBC.