Am 3. April 1973 took the Motorola engineer Martin Cooper the first mobile phone out of his pocket. On the street, punched in a number and made a call. The passers-by stared at him in amazement. The phone call that was supposed to start a revolution was actually rather despicable. “Hi, Joel,” Cooper said to his colleague. “I’m calling you from a cell phone. But a real mobile phone. A personal, portable cellular phone,” Cooper recalls making the first call ever from a cellular device.
Colleague Joel, who worked for the competing company Bell, was so amazed that there was silence on the other end of the line. “I think he ground his teeth,” says the 94-year-old, laughing. This Monday, the first call from a mobile phone is exactly 50 years ago.
On this day in 1973, Cooper was standing on 6th Avenue in the heart of New York. A few years ago, he said his team had announced a press conference for the presentation of the first mobile phone for that day. But then a journalist asked him about the device. Cooper spontaneously decided to give the journalist a “glitzy demonstration.”
A kilo heavy mobile phone
50 years later sees DynaTACthe first functional mobile phone, looks like a monster compared to modern devices: Knapp one kilo was Cooper’s prototype with large antenna heavy and 25 centimeters long. The infrastructure for mobile calls has existed in the US for a number of years – in the form of cellular cells for car phones. Cooper and his team packed the technology into a portable device, and it wasn’t mass-produced until more than 10 years later: Motorola introduced it in 1983 DynaTAC 8000X out that sold for $4,000 – which is well over $10,000 today.
In return, paying customers got a full 30 minutes of battery life. You couldn’t write messages with your cell phone. No wonder that sales were initially limited. At the time, Cooper would not have thought that mobile phones would one day mutate into handy supercomputers with internet and cameras. as BBC reports.
More cell phones than people
Especially the service “Short Message Service’ (SMS) with its 160 characters then made mobile phones attractive to young people. The first SMS with the message “Merry Christmas” went to the Vodafone employee on December 3, 1992 Richard Jarvis. A leap followed in 2007 when Steve Jobs to an astonished world public iPhone introduced. With innovative functions and a new type of user interface, it helped smartphones achieve a breakthrough. With the first Samsung Galaxy In 2009, the duel finally began between the iPhone and Google’s Android operating system, which has shaped the smartphone world to this day.
There are now more cell phones than people in the world, and devices have spread to almost every corner of the world. Besides iPhone and Android smartphones, there are tons of simple feature phones in countries like India. In Germany, for example, there are currently almost 2 mobile phone connections for every person.
Call perceived as intrusive
However, the telephone call, the personal conversation, has lost much of its importance. Texting – whether via Instagram, Whatsapp, iMessage or other platforms – has largely replaced speaking. Calling someone is sometimes considered pushy, especially among young people. Rather, some would send a voice message. What seems completely normal today would have been comparable a few years ago to people only talking to each other on the answering machine.
Communication via cellphones in general is now almost unimaginable for almost everyone, while landline connections are becoming less and less important. At the same time, Martin Cooper wasn’t even sure before the trend-setting performance Cellular Revolution would actually start: “We were worried if the phone would work when we turned it on. Luckily it did.”
Cooper generally believes cell phones will be able to increase our productivity, improve our health, and even help eliminate wars one day.” The cell phone won’t do it by itself, but it will be the main part of that great future be,” he says.
