Photo: Ed Jones / AFP / Getty Images
April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, Engineer and General Manager, Communications Technology Division, Motorola, made a phone call in Manhattan with the first mobile phone, the Motorola device in question weighed no less than 1 kg!.
Considered the inventor of the first portable telephone, Martin Cooper, born in 1928, is also the first person to use such a device to make a phone call. It was April 3, 1973, exactly 40 years old, in New York. Cooper was then CEO of Motorola’s communications division, where he put together a small team to work on this mobile phone project, a revolution at the time.
Cooper therefore makes his call on the street, on Sixth Avenue, near the Hilton in Manhattan: his cordless phone weighs 1,12 kilograms, has an antenna of almost 10 centimeters and a battery that lasted 20 minutes before the battery does not discharge. As interlocutor he chose Joel Engel, his direct rival at Bell Labs, who was also working at that time on a mobile phone.
Prototype designed by Martin Cooper paves the way for phones DynaTAC, to be marketed by Motorola years later, in 1990. At the time, the device nicknamed “the brick”, had 20 buttons and a communication autonomy of 30 minutes before needing to recharge for around ten hours. An imposing device that nonetheless marked the birth of mobile phones for the “general public”, yes it can if you could pay $4..
Since the first call made by Martin Cooper, mobile technologies have constantly evolved, with the arrival of 2G in 1990 and then 3G on 2001. In 1991, it was estimated that one in two people owned a mobile phone, while in 1990 to 2011, the number of mobile subscriptions increased from 12,4 million to more than 6 billion worldwide. An evolution that continues, with the current arrival of 4G on the market.
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