The cellphone revolution kicked off 40 years ago today

On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper placed the world's first cellphone call. The rest is history. 

|
Reuters
Engineer Martin Cooper holds the Motorola DynaTAC phone, the world's first commercial handheld cellular phone, and his current mobile phone during a news conference in Oviedo, Spain, in 2009.

It's easy to forget, in an age when our iPhones and Galaxies do everything for us – from storing our music libraries to pointing us to the nearest taco joint – that smart phones were not always smart.

In the beginning, they were cellular telephones – heavy, extremely expensive chunks of plastic with extendable antennas and all the aesthetic appeal of a brick. 

So this afternoon, let us all observe a moment of silence for the original cellphone, the first of which was pressed into use exactly 40 years ago today, on April 3, 1973. The device in question was a 10-inch DynaTAC handset, and it was built by a Motorola team headed up by inventor Martin Cooper. In fact, Mr. Cooper himself placed the first call on the DynaTAC, phoning up the head of research at Bell Labs while standing outside an NYC hotel. 

"The first cell phone model weighed over one kilo" – or two and a half pounds – "and you could only talk for 20 minutes before the battery ran out," Cooper told the audience at a privacy conference back in 2009. "Which is just as well because you would not be able to hold it up for much longer." 

But Cooper and his team at Motorola spent the next decade honing the technology, and in 1983, the first commercially-available cell phone, the DynaTAC 8000x, went on sale. The asking price was $3,995. Cooper, for his part, has since said that although he knew he was on the cutting edge of technology in 1973, he and his colleagues had little inkling of the massive smart phone industry the DynaTAC would spawn. 

"If you think about it, in 1973, when we made the first cell phone call, there were no digital personal computers," he told an interviewer recently. "There were no digital cameras. The internet didn't exist in any form at all. In fact, there were no large-scale integrated circuits. None of the things that are in a smartphone today could have even been envisioned in 1973 and I hate to say it but we didn't expect that to happen." 

In related news, this week Cooper received the $100,000 Marconi Prize, an annual award named after Nobel laureate and inventor Guglielmo Marconi

"Today, what [Cooper] foresaw seems pretty elementary," Vint Cerf, vice chairman of the Marconi Society, said in a statement. "But the idea of making telecommunications ‘person-centric’ instead of tied to a particular place – a car, home or telephone booth – caused a tectonic shift in the industry." 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to The cellphone revolution kicked off 40 years ago today
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0403/The-cellphone-revolution-kicked-off-40-years-ago-today
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe