50 years of the first cell phone call

On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper gathered the press in New York for what was to be a revolutionary announcement. There, in front of the cameras of the mainstream media, he took out a large "brick" from his briefcase. A phone that looked like it had been pulled out of a clown costume. He raised his, also exaggerated, antenna and dialed a number.

On the other end of the line is Joel Engel, his colleague at AT&T. “Hi, I'm calling you from my mobile,” Cooper said.

In the hands of a successful Motorola engineer was DynaTAC, a prototype weighing 2 kilograms and measuring 23 centimeters. It had a battery that allowed for about 30 minutes of talk time and took almost 10 hours to charge. But that was the beginning.

This 50-year-old moment marked the beginning of an industry that today has not only become one of the most widespread and important, but also the germ of devices that, for better and for worse, have become ubiquitous. in our life.

It is estimated that around 1.5 billion mobile phones are sold annually. A device created by Motorola, a now defunct company and part of the Lenovo group. But which at one time managed to bypass the giant among the telecommunications giants of that time: AT&T.

Three months to build the first (real) mobile phone that works after 25 years of achievement

The story that takes us to Chicago and leads to Cooper's call to Engel, the AT&T engineer in charge of what was thought to be the first mobile phone, came from afar.

AT&T, the company originally founded by Graham Bell as Bell Telephone, has already done a lot to make phones mobile. But before the introduction of the DynaTAC, its competitors' cell phones - since their communications are based on cell phones in order to be able to carry out their mobility - had to be tethered to a car or briefcase, rather bulky due to their weight.

In 1946, Old Bell had already provided the first mobile phone service with devices weighing over 30 kg installed in cars. The service was only available in major cities or on highway corridors and was intended for businesses rather than individuals. The equipment occupied most of the trunk of the car, and subscribers made calls by picking up the handset and talking to the switchboard operator. By 1948, the service had 5,000 clients.

One of the major factors driving the development of mobile wireless technology was the need for military forces to communicate on the ground during World War II. The SRC-536 Handie-Talkie was developed by the predecessor Motorola Corporation and was used by the US military during the war. The device was a two-way radio, small enough to be held in one hand, and resembled a telephone.

But early mobile services used a small number of large radio masts, which meant that all subscribers in a large city had a common central base station. It didn't seem like a good idea for Universal Mobile Service.

AT&T and Motorola engineers began work on a concept to solve this problem, but it took almost three decades. Mind you, AT&T got its first prototype before Motorola did. Although this is an act of corporate blindness, it was decided to release it to the market. It has been estimated that the market is unlikely to have between 200,000 and 300,000 customers. Not viable for phone company volumes.

That's when Martin Cooper got to work with DynaTAC. They managed to launch it in just three months. It took another decade to make it available to everyone - and this can be said because at the time it cost almost $4,000 - it took another decade. Because this mobile phone, with almost 10 hours of charging needed for a half-hour call, had many more problems besides its short autonomy.

First mobile phone for $4,000

Let's go back to the original call:

Joel, I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real cell phone, a portable cell phone, a real one.

Martin Cooper to his colleague and competitor at AT&T.

In 2013, Cooper explained to CNN that the call was very short. “I don’t remember exactly what I said, but for a while he was very quiet. I assumed he was grinding his teeth. He was very polite and ended the conversation,” Cooper said.

While AT&T focused on business car phones, Motorola worked on lighter tools. They were inspired by a Chicago police petition that they needed a real cell phone to talk to each other while patrolling the streets.

It wasn't until 1968 that AT&T was asked by the FCC to submit a plan to use part of the UHF band to create a truly portable telephone. AT&T proposed using cellular architecture to extend its services to all mobile phones.

The situation began to deteriorate when Motorola took steps to prevent AT&T from obtaining a monopoly on mobile phones. It was then that Martin Cooper was commissioned to design the first real cell phone. His vision for a wireless personal device was inspired by Star Trek and the use of Captain James T. Kirk's communicator.

“At that time, even cordless phones did not exist. We had a press conference in 1973 - I handed the phone to a young journalist and asked her to call, ”Cooper recalls of that day.

He asked me "Can I call my mom in Australia?" and I said "Of course!". And he did it… Sophisticated New Yorkers were left with their mouths open.”

Motorola executives were so enamored with Cooper's mobile phone concept that they invested over $100 million between 1973 and 1983, long before any revenue was generated.

In 1980, Motorola created a promotional video about the capabilities of personal mobile phones. Thanks to this, the brick seems almost elegant.

Finally, on September 21, 1983, Motorola made history by launching the world's first mobile phone. Most of the volume of the device was the battery, which weighed four to five times more than a telephone set. Subsequently, films like American Psycho or Wall Street turned him into a status symbol.

The next challenge was to adapt the existing small infrastructure that was used for car phones at the time to support mobile phone calls.

Cooper told CNN that "the challenge was to create a network with the promise at the time that we only need three megahertz of spectrum, the equivalent of five television channels, to reach the entire world."

From the first mobile device to smartphones

What Cooper didn't expect was the addition of apps and cameras, not to mention touchscreen technology. “I have to tell you that no matter how dreamy we are, we never imagined that all these things could be combined into one,” he commented, referring to smartphones.

Cooper, now 93, says his dream of having everyone have access to their own mobile phone has surpassed his wildest dreams.

“Actually, we had a joke that said that in the future, when you are born, you will be assigned a phone number, and if you do not answer, you will die.” In every joke there is only a fraction of a joke...