On April 3, 1978, the very first mobile phone call was placed by Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola. Standing close to a 900 MHz base station on Sixth Avenue in New York City, Cooper dialed the Bell Labs headquarters in New Jersey. The device he used was the DynaTAC (dynamic adaptive total area coverage) 8000X — a prototype that would eventually earn the distinction of being the first commercially released mobile phone.
The person on the receiving end of that groundbreaking call was Joel Engel of Bell Laboratories at AT&T, as Cooper held the hefty 2 1/2-pound device up to his ear. Cooper and his team had been imagining this kind of technology since as far back as the late 1940s, and they proudly announced that the Motorola team had created the first functional portable phone. The handset itself tipped the scales at 1.1 kg, stretched 22.86 cm in length, 12.7 cm in depth, and 4.44 cm in width. Battery life was modest at best — users could manage just 30 minutes of talk time before facing a 10-hour recharge.
What exactly did Cooper say during that historic conversation? Nobody really knows. He simply placed the call to check whether the connection would work and whether the audio quality held up on the other end. What mattered most was the outcome: Motorola's leadership threw their full support behind Cooper's mobile phone vision, committing $100 million to develop the project further.
Getting the DynaTAC into the hands of everyday consumers would require another full decade, and it took two more decades beyond that for cell phones to surpass landlines in worldwide usage. Still, that single call represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of mobile technology. Those bulky early cell phones laid the groundwork for the sleek, lightweight devices that have since become indispensable tools for people everywhere.