It’s been 50 years since the first cell phone call

On April 3, 1973, the first successful cell phone call was made by a man named Martin Cooper in Manhattan. Cooper was an engineer for Motorola at the time and decided that the first call should be made to his competitor, Joel Engel, at Bell Labs (owned by AT&T).

"And I said, 'Hi, Joel, it's Marty Cooper.' And he said, 'Oh, Hi, Marty.' And I said, 'Joel, I'm calling you from a cell phone. But a real cell phone, a handheld, personal, portable cell phone,'" recalled Cooper, 50 years later. "As you could tell, I was not averse to rubbing it in."

The first commercially sold cell phone based on Cooper's prototype was sold in 1984 and would cost US$11,700 if bought today. Well, cell phones have changed a lot since then. For one thing, the telephone book that Cooper used to access the phone number of Engel has gone by the wayside at this point, that's for sure. And they're smaller than they were back in those early days, too.

Ben Wood, who runs the Mobile Phone Museum in the UK, explains: "There was no messaging, no camera. Thirty minutes of talk-time, 10 hours to charge the battery, about 12 hours of stand-by time and a 6in (15cm) antenna on the top." It also weighed about four times as much as an iPhone 14.

Now, we really can't go anywhere without our cell phones. But Cooper isn't really that impressed by them. He says, "I think today's phone is suboptimal. It's really not a very good phone in many respects. Just think about it. You take a piece of plastic and glass that's flat - and you put it against the curve of your head; you hold your hand in an uncomfortable position; when you want to do these wonderful things that it can do, you have to get an app [first]."