First Cell Phone Call Made More Than Half a Century Ago on This Day

First Cell Phone Call Made More Than Half a Century Ago on This Day

Cooper holding a DynaTAC cellphone in 2007. Credit: Rico Shen, CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikipedia On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer made the first cell phone call in history from a sidewalk on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan with a device the size of a brick. “I’m calling you on a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a personal, handheld, portable cell phone,” Cooper said on the phone to Joel Engel, head of AT&T-owned Bell Labs. Even though the t…

Fifty-two years ago, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made history when he made the first call from a portable cell phone. It was on April 3, 1973, on a Manhattan street, where Cooper used the famous Motorola DynaTAC, a device that looked more like a brick than a cell phone. Why? Well, it weighed 1.13 kilos and was 30.48 centimeters tall (almost the size of a school ruler!). In a move that went down in history, Cooper called Joel Engel, another B…