50 years ago to the day, inventor Martin Cooper took to a sidewalk on 6th Avenue in New York City with the equivalent of a plastic brick stuffed with electronic parts and dialed a number phone. The first cellular call in history had just been made.
The now 94-year-old engineer, who worked for a tiny phone company called Motorola – which has since grown into a multinational worth around US$48 billion – dedicated his first call to none other than Joel Engel, who ran the firm of Bell Labs research, owned by AT&T at the time.
“I’m calling you with a cell phone, but a real personal cell phone, hand-held and portable,” Mr. Cooper said on April 3, 1973, a bit drooling, during that historic first call.
“It was the biggest company in the world, and we were a small Chicago company. They didn’t think we were important,” recalled the engineer in an interview with CNN.
At the time, Bell Labs, which notably developed the first transistors, was seeking to create the world’s first cell phone, only to be outpaced by Motorola.
It took about ten years after the first cellular call for cell phones to be made available to the general public. These pioneers came in a large format, with a simple numeric keypad to dial numbers, and had nothing to do with the smartphones that have become widespread since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007.
Despite everything, Mr. Cooper suspected from the beginnings of his invention that it would one day spread universally.
“I’m not surprised that everyone has a cell phone. We had fun telling each other stories, like that one day we would be assigned a phone number at birth,” Mr. Cooper recalled to CNN.