Today in 1973, Martin Cooper made the first mobile phone call, using an early model of Motorola’s DynaTAC phone, a phone weighing 2.5 pounds, measuring 9 inches long and 5 inches deep, and featuring about 20 minutes of battery life.
Megan Garber in The Atlantic:
Telephones, at that point, were not things you could just carry around with you as you walked. (Cooper liked to joke that the DynaTAC’s limited talk time wasn’t technically a problem — since “you couldn’t hold that phone up for that long.”) So a guy strolling around near Radio City Music Hall, talking animatedly into a large hunk of plastic, was a spectacle. Even for a city that was used to spectacles. “As I walked down the street while talking on the phone,” Cooper would later recall, “sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call.”
And that, of course, was the point. “We wanted to do a dazzling demonstration,” Cooper said. The team’s goal wasn’t just to invent something; it was to let the world know, in as striking a way as possible, that the something had been invented. The demo would end, appropriately, with the technologist processing to the Midtown Hilton, where a gaggle of reporters were assembled for a press conference. Cooper would hand his phone to one of those reporters so she could call her mother in Australia…
The Federal Communications Commission, at the time, was deliberating whether to allow AT&T to set up a network that would provide wireless phone service in local markets, ostensibly for use with car phones. Not only, Cooper knew, would this proposal give AT&T an effective monopoly in those markets; it would also mean that car phones, rather than hand-held, would likely become the dominant mobile technology. Cooper and his colleagues saw where things might be heading -- so they decided to intervene. They charted a new destination, and then set their sights on leading the way there. But they had to hurry.
Rudy Krolopp, lead designer of the device that would become the DynaTAC, recalled the frantic weeks that led, finally, to the cell phone. "Marty called me to his office one day in December 1972 and said, 'We've got to build a portable cell phone,'" Krolopp says. "And I said, 'What the hell's a portable cell phone?'"
They would answer the question by inventing it.