The first Cell Phone Call

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.”

Motorola executive demonstrates the first cell phone

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

 

Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player.

20 thoughts on “The first Cell Phone Call”

  3. 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.

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    1. 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.

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  4. 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.

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    1. 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…

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  6. 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.

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      1. 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!

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