38 years ago he made the first cell phone call

bigbazza · Apr 4, 2011

38 years ago he made the first cell phone call.
From todays "Way Off Base" at http://www.majorgeeks.com

Read the full article at http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION...ss/cnn_topstories+(RSS:+Top+Stories)&utm_cont

Some extracts.

Sunday is the anniversary of something that undoubtedly has changed your life.

Whether for good or for bad is a question only you can answer.
On this day in 1973 -- on April 3 of that year -- a man did something no one had ever done before.

You may bless him for it or curse him for it. At this juncture, it hardly matters. The impact of what he did is so enormous that judging it now is almost beside the point.
The man's name was Martin Cooper. He was 44 at the time.
He made a cell phone call.

The world's first. At least the first public one; the cell phone had been tested in the lab, but never tried in the real world.
"As I walked down the street while talking on the phone," Cooper once told an interviewer, "sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call."
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But Cooper, who was the general manager of Motorola's communications systems division, had the idea that people didn't want to be tethered to a stationary telephone, even if the phone could ride along with them in their car. He thought that the phone should be so portable that it could go anywhere they went.
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As I say: Bless him, or curse him. That person who annoyed you to the point of near rage this morning -- the one who was talking on his cell phone so loudly and so rudely that you felt your blood pressure rising?
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When Martin Cooper made that first cell phone call, he did not make it to another cell phone. People didn't have them yet -- who could he call?

No, he made the cell phone call to a land line -- specifically, to the land line of his chief competitor at Bell Labs. Motorola had beaten Bell to become the first company to make personal cell phones work. Cooper, you might say, rubbed it in. Think how the Bell Labs research engineer must have felt when he heard Cooper calling him from the noisy streets of Manhattan.
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That first cell phone was so big that it was often described as resembling a shoe, or a brick. It weighed 2½ pounds. Cooper would joke to friends and colleagues that the calls from that phone would have to be short in duration: Who had the strength to hold it to an ear for very long?
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What a convenience/curse he unleashed on the world. :-D

Bazza

dyamond · Apr 4, 2011

I don't think I could live without my cell. It's like my baby, my love and my lifeline all wrapped into one! :-D

Spad · Apr 5, 2011

bigbazza said: ↑

38 years ago he made the first cell phone call.
. . .
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. . . and his call was not dropped . . .

BILLMCC66 · Apr 5, 2011

They are undoubtedly handy gadgets but there is no more privacy,Martin Cooper has a lot to answer for.

Ken3 · Apr 5, 2011

bigbazza said: ↑

That first cell phone was so big that it was often described as resembling a shoe, or a brick. It weighed 2½ pounds. Cooper would joke to friends and colleagues that the calls from that phone would have to be short in duration: Who had the strength to hold it to an ear for very long?
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I would go back further with Mel Brooks and his TV show "Get Smart" with the shoe phone. Though gimicky, it could be seen as the birth of an idea of a cell phone. Without searching the 'net, not sure when the concept was first conceived.

Phantom · Apr 5, 2011

Well everyone back in the '30's thought that the Dick Tracey watch-phone was ridiculously impossible to achieve.:confused

Ken3 · Apr 5, 2011

Don't forget Start Trek introduced pads for reports and what-not.

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38 years ago he made the first cell phone call

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