11/03/2020
The First Commercial Mobile Phone
The world's first mobile phone call was made in 1973 by Motorola employee Martin Cooper from the streets of New York City. He called his biggest rival. "I was calling Joel Engel who was my antagonist, my counterpart at AT&T, which at the time was the biggest company in the world. We were a little company in Chicago. They considered us to be a flea on an elephant," Cooper told BBC.
"I said 'Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cellphone, a real, handheld, portable cellphone.' There was a silence at the other end. I suspect he was grinding his teeth."
The phone he called on was a prototype Motorola DynaTAC which, a decade later, was to become the world's first commercially available mobile handset. It got the FCC's thumbs up in 1983 and launched in 1984 at a cost of $3,995 -- which is about $9,000 today, accounting for inflation.
As a symbol for '80s yuppie tech, the DynaTAC appeared in Gordon Gekko's hands in Wall Street, and later, Patrick Bateman used one in American Psycho. It was also known as the "Zack Morris phone" because the Saved by the Bell character often used a similar model in the series.
The first mobile phone call in the UK took place in 1985. Comedian and one-half of Morecambe and Wise, Ernie Wise, called from London to Vodafone's Newbury, Berkshire offices, then located over a curry house.
