It was 46 years ago today that the first cell phone call was made…so when you see people walking down the street like zombies with their eyes on their phone…you know the beginning.
On April 3, 1973, the first cell phone call was made by Motorola engineer Martin Cooper from Sixth Avenue in New York while walking between 53rd and 54th streets.
Martin used a 2 1/2-pound prototype to his ear and called a rival, Joel Engel of Bell Laboratories at AT&T, to declare that his Motorola team had devised a functional portable phone. “There was silence at the other end of the line,” Cooper recalled to Bloomberg in 2015. “To this day, Joel doesn’t remember that call, and I’m not sure I blame him.”
Martin Cooper…wonder if he is about to text after the call?
https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-2018/first-cell-phone-call.html
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Fits right in the pocket too!…ah…maybe not lol
Sleek….and brick like…
now we know what Jethro Tull were talking about with ‘Thick As A Brick”
lol
Needed a wagon to transport one.
I guess back then it looked impressive…you wanted everyone to see… and they couldn’t miss it.
I had an early cell phone and one day I dropped it as I was getting out of my car. My neighbor was walking his dog and he found it, he said he thought it was a turtle, which it sort of looked like.
The earliest one I ever had was the early 2000s…so I missed the real big ones. I did have a beeper for work in the 90s…hated that thing. Spent half my time looking for a pay phone.
wow, hard to believe it goes back that far, although I did see some sort of “cold case” type real life crime show which went back to the late-70s and one of the detectives had a car phone which surprised me a great deal.
I was an early-ish adopter, getting one around ’94 …I had a wonky car, at the time a girlfriend who lived in a bad neighborhood and often went birding or taking pictures in remote parks so I didn’t want to be stuck with no way to communicate if the car wouldn’t start. However, I was late to the game with a smart phone, only reluctantly got one of those last fall when my old “flip phone” sort stopped working where I moved to.
John Lennon actually had a car phone in the sixties I believe… Not a cell but a car phone. I think they worked like a radio to be connected to a line…I could be wrong on that part…but I couldn’t believe they were around then.
I didn’t get a cell until the early 2000s because of work…It was a flip phone…
I was reading about this earlier on History. I thought about posting on it. You beat me to it. This is what popped in my head as soon as I read it:
https://youtu.be/59q-8_N4hL4
Wow I haven’t heard that song in years…I forgot it exsisted.
I have a head full of useless trivia. 😁😎
I do also…but its fun
I love watching those old movies where the phones are like the first ones. Just like when you see a rotary dial phone in a movie. Very cool video, with the actual maker of the first cell phones. You can see he’s a sharp cookie, and still going strong.
I know I’ve seen on a few old seventies shows…he probably didn’t realize what he was starting.
Have you ever seen that Steve Martin movie, The Jerk? I often think of cell phones like the invention in that movie. Carl Reiner (I think he directed) was a prophet!
Yes I love the movie. Carl Reiner is great…
Do you see a parallel between the invention he made and cell phones?
The thing to hold up the glasses is all I remember. Now I feel like I’m missing something obvious!