Martin Cooper, an American engineer who worked with Motorola is known as the father of the cell phone. Cooper, on April 3, 1973, placed the first publicly known mobile phone call in the world with a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC, which essentially changed the future of telecommunications in the world by demonstrating that truly portable personal communication was achievable.
Martin Cooper: The Father of Cell Phone
Martin Cooper (born December 26, 1928) is an American engineer and pioneer in the wireless communications industry. Cooper came up with the first handheld mobile phone when he was serving as a general manager at Motorola, a telecommunications multinational company.
His vision has managed to change the focus of the telecommunications industry to no longer thinking of the vehicle-bound car phones but rather to the really portable and personal communication devices. The Motorola DynaTAC pioneered by Cooper created the architecture of the modern mobile cellular networks.
In 2013, Martin Cooper received the highly esteemed Charles Stark Draper Prize and the Marconi Prize due to his contributions to mobile technology.
The Historic First Mobile Phone Call
On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper made the first cell phone call while standing on the Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. He made the call to Joel Engel, his competitor and the head of research at Bell Labs (AT&T).
According to Cooper, he told Engel, "Joel, I am talking to you on a cellular phone, a cellular handheld portable phone”. This particular incident demonstrated that cell technology would not be bound to cars.
Source: Martin Cooper
The Motorola DynaTAC Prototype
The phone employed in that historic call was not in any way a smooth gadget like the present-day phones. The Motorola prototype was a huge piece of hardware which weighed 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg) and was 10 inches long. It provided only 30 minutes of talk time and needed 10 hours to charge completely.
The Development of the First Commercial Cell Phone
More development and infrastructure were needed before the prototype was available to the public. After a decade Motorola launched the DynaTAC 8000X, it was the first commercialized mobile phone released in the market in 1983.
It had a retail price of $3,995 (equivalent to more than $13000 dollars today) and was initially bought by only rich business executives until the technology was scaled down to a smaller size and price.
Interesting Facts about the First Cell phone
1. When the commercial Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was introduced in 1983, it was priced at $3,995. Inflation-adjusted that value would be more than $13,000 in 2026, which is to say that the device was only accessible to the extremely wealthy and to the uppermost business leaders.
2. The first mobile phone established its role in the pop culture of the 1980s when the first mobile phone, a Motorola DynaTAC, was made famous in the cult 1987 film Wall Street when its character Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) was walking down the beach with this device in his hand.
3. The first phone, weighing up to 2.5 pounds, with its cream-colored casing and its heavy 10-inch frame, got the lasting nickname The Brick, and deserved it.
4. The first cell phone did not have screens to scroll, it did not have a contact list to save, and it had no text messaging functions whatsoever. It was merely a 12-key telephone keypad as the interface, and the device was capable of only one operation, which was making analog voice calls.
5. It required a truly unbelievable amount of capital to realize the vision of Martin Cooper. Motorola spent an estimated $100 million over a period of 10 years between the prototype call in 1973 and commercial sale of a single phone in 1983.
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