The first ever mobile phone call
On the morning of April 3rd ,1973, Dr. Joel S. Engel picked up the receiver of his landline. The voice at the other end was clear, distinct, and more than a little smug. “Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cell phone - a real, handheld, portable cell phone.” At this moment, Dr. Engel, Manager of Corporate Planning at AT&T, became the first person in history to receive a call from a cell phone. The voice in question? Martin Cooper, head of communications systems at Motorola and Dr. Engels’ professional rival.
Cooper made the world’s first cell phone call while flanked by reporters on his way to a press conference at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan. The moment marked the end of a long race to provide mobile connectivity to the public.
Cooper’s original cell phone weighed over a kilogram and could endure 20 minutes of talk time before needing a 10-hour recharge. At the time however, it felt something out of a sci-fi movie. In fact, Cooper had been directly inspired by comic book detective Dick Tracy’s two-way wristwatch, and the handheld communicators from Star Trek. Martin Cooper’s portable phone was a culmination of a life’s work.
How the mobile phone was invented
AT&T had spent years investing heavily in car phones, which they saw as the inevitable next step in the progression of telephone systems. They had even approached the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for exclusive spectrum rights, in an attempt to monopolise the mobile phone market — a move that was welcomed by the FCC because it simplified their licensing protocol.
Not to be outdone, Cooper’s division at Motorola launched a counterattack — they argued in front of the FCC that AT&T’s monopoly over the spectrum threatened the market. Cooper also went forward with an insurmountably ambitious project: a true personal communications device that didn’t limit you to a car or a house or an office. In Cooper’s own words, “the time was ripe for true personal communications.” This vision was eventually realised while trudging through traffic on 6th avenue. AT&T had lost the race and Motorola was on top of the telecommunications industry.
Martin Cooper: the life and times
Martin Cooper is a telecommunications visionary who stands alongside Alexander Graham Bell in the gallery of telecommunications greats. Born in 1928, Cooper developed an early affinity for tech and gadgetry in the pages of his favourite sci-fi comic books. After graduating with a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Cooper spent several years working at Teletype in Chicago before joining Motorola as a senior development engineer in 1954 — an opportunity which he named as one of the luckiest things to ever happen to him. “If you wanted to change society, Motorola was the place to be,” he noted. Crucially, the senior management at Motorola believed in Cooper’s vision for personal mobility. They invested 100 million dollars into his division before it began generating any noticeable revenue.
The investment paid off in the form of a personal handheld device lovingly dubbed The Brick.
Cooper’s mobile phone worked off a bare-bones network that might be considered a predecessor to everything from 0G to 5G. To connect these early devices, Motorola had set up a base station on the roof of the Burlington House (now the AllianceBernstein building) which connected directly into the AT&T landline telephone system. Although rudimentary, Cooper and his team would later go on to work on the first network system for two-way radio communication. In 1975, Martin Cooper was named as the lead inventor on the patent for the Radio Telephone System, regarded as the first description of an operating standard for mobile network communications.
Cooper’s tireless work laid the foundation for much of the contemporary telecommunications industry. In 2013 he was awarded for his work with the Marconi Prize — an unparalleled honour in the field of communication and information science. In the words of vice chairman of the Marconi Society, Vint Cerf, “the idea of making telecommunications ‘person-centric’ instead of tied to a particular place . . . caused a tectonic shift in the industry.”
The future of mobile technology
The world of telecommunications is unrecognizable today from when Martin Cooper first entered it in 1928. This is largely thanks to a series of restless innovators like him. Few inventors have managed to impact the course of human communications to the extent that Cooper has. And certainly none have done it with the audacious flair of Martin Cooper’s legendary first mobile phone call.
What then, is the next step, the next cellphone-sized shift? In recent years, the dawn of eSIMs has created a sea change within the mobile communications sphere. Learn more about eSIMs, how they work and how to use one, in our comprehensive guide.
