New Delhi:
The first mobile phone call was made today 46 years ago. The call was made on April 3, 1973, by Motorola employee Martin Cooper on Sixth Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets, in New York City. He made the call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey. Cooper held the 2 1/2-pound prototype to his ear and announced that 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.”
The call was made on a prototype of the DynaTAC (dynamic adaptive total area coverage) 8000X. This later became the first such phone to be commercially released. In 1973, it weighed 1.1 kg and measured 22.86 cm long, 12.7 cm deep, and 4.44 cm wide.
Motorola management was supportive of Cooper's mobile phone concept and invested $100 million between 1973 and 1993 before any revenues were realized. The company produced the below promotional video on the possibilities of personal cellular phones in 1980, EDN Network reported.
According to a Quartz report, AMPS was in development for around 15 years, and engineers made the first mobile call on a prototype network a decade before the first commercial network call. It took that long to troubleshoot the various hardware, software, and radio frequency issues associated with setting up a fully functional commercial network.
