One thing as common as the Internet connection is a mobile phone. Everybody needs it and everybody has it. In the present age, it’s more of a necessity than something only the cool kids have. Unlike an iPhone, which has an elitist appeal, most mid-range phones today cater to all our basic necessities. They might not be as faster or as flashier as the top-end phones in the market, nonetheless, they are good.
At a time when simple voice calls (remember those giant monochrome mobile phones?) are being replaced by video calls and Facetime, we cannot help but wonder– where did it all start? When was first call using a mobile phone made and what did they talk about?
Martin Cooper (Photo: Wikimedia/Flickr)
The history of mobile phones dates back to 1908 when Kentucky-based inventor Natha B. Stubblefield patented the first ever ‘wireless telephone called the ‘Cave Phone’. The phone used radio signals instead of the wired networks to communicate. However, it wasn’t until 1947 that the engineers at AT&T’s Bell Labs developed the design of a cellular network, as we know them today.
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The first commercial call was made nearly 44 years ago on April 3, 1973, by a Motorola executive and researcher Martin Cooper near a 900 MHz base-station on the 6th Avenue between the 53rd and the 54th street in New York to the headquarters of Bell Labs that was located in New Jersey.
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While the contents of their conversation might have been lost forever, but what we do know is that the prototype (DynaTAC 8000X) that Cooper used weighed 1.1 kg and it was 22.86cm long, 12.7cm deep and 4.44cm wide (yeah, and you were complaining about the tablets!). It offered a talk time of 20 minutes and took nearly 10 hours to charge completely (can you imagine having such a phone?!). 10 years later it became the first mobile phone to be released commercially.
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