A call from a New York sidewalk
In April 1973, Martin Cooper, an engineer leading a team at Motorola, stood on a street in New York and made a call on a prototype handheld phone. The widely told version is that he called a rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel, to say he was speaking on a real portable cellular phone. The call is usually dated to April 3, 1973. Details of the conversation come largely from later recollections, so it is best to treat the exact words as uncertain, while the event itself is well established.
The prototype was large by modern standards. It is usually described as weighing roughly two and a half pounds, or a little over a kilogram, with a battery that lasted for a short time. It was a demonstration of a concept: that a person, rather than a vehicle, could carry a phone. Before this, mobile telephones were generally installed in cars, powered by the car battery and tied to it. The underlying idea of carrying messages by radio without wires dates back to wireless telegraphy around 1900, and mobile telephony applied it to speech.
Why a phone needed a network
A handheld cellular phone is not useful alone. It needs a system of base stations, each covering a small area called a cell, that can hand a call from one to the next as the user moves. The idea of dividing a region into cells and reusing radio frequencies in distant cells had been discussed at Bell Labs since the late 1940s. It took years for the technology, regulation and funding to line up.
The delay was partly about radio spectrum. In the United States, regulators had to decide how much of the airwaves would be allotted to mobile service and who could operate it. Motorola and AT&T, the Bell System’s parent, had different views about whether the first systems should focus on car phones or portable ones. Motorola argued for portables, and the 1973 demonstration was partly meant to make that case to regulators and the public. The broader story of how networks grew is told in the history of cellular networks, while this article stays with the handset.
From prototype to product
Turning the prototype into something sold took another ten years. Motorola’s engineers reduced the size and weight and designed a more finished product, and the industrial designer Rudy Krolopp is usually credited with the look of the original. The company named the line DynaTAC, short for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage.
The model that reached the market was the DynaTAC 8000X. It received U.S. regulatory approval in 1983, and the first commercial U.S. cellular network, run by Ameritech in the Chicago area, began service in October of that year. The phone was commonly reported to cost close to four thousand dollars, which in those years put it out of reach for most households. Its reported talk time was about half an hour, with a recharge taking many hours. The weight was a little under two pounds, and the phone was long enough that users sometimes called it “the brick.”
Early customers were mostly business users, including executives and professionals who valued being reachable. Coverage was limited to the areas where the first cells had been built, and calls could be expensive.
Disputed firsts
“First mobile phone” is a title that several things could claim, and it helps to be careful.
- Car-mounted radio telephones were in use well before 1973, and some are covered in the story of the first mobile phone.
- Japan’s NTT launched a commercial cellular system in Tokyo in 1979, and Nordic countries launched a shared system in 1981, both before the DynaTAC went on sale in the U.S.
- Soviet and European inventors built portable radio telephones in the 1950s and 1960s, though accounts of these devices vary in reliability and none became a general service.
What is most commonly credited to Cooper’s team is the first call made from a handheld cellular phone, and to the DynaTAC 8000X the first handheld phone approved for commercial use in the United States. These are narrower, more defensible claims than “the first mobile phone.”
What the DynaTAC lacked
The phone did one thing: it made and received analog voice calls. It had a numeric keypad, a small display for the number, and simple memory for stored numbers. There was no text messaging, no camera and no way to run programs. Voice quality and security were basic; analog calls could be overheard with a suitable radio receiver. Batteries of the time stored little energy for their weight, which is a large part of why the early phones were bulky. Better cells, such as the later lithium-ion batteries, would change this.
Later effects
The DynaTAC was followed by smaller and lighter models in the 1980s and 1990s, and in time by digital networks that improved capacity and call quality. The sequence of dates shows how slowly the technology moved: ten years from first demonstration to first retail sale, and about another decade before mobile phones were commonly seen in ordinary hands.
Cooper has often said that the aim was to give people a personal number rather than a place to call, a shift from phoning a location, as in the original telephone invention of the 1870s, to phoning a person. Whether or not he put it exactly that way at the time, the shift did happen, and it set the stage for the smartphone era.