The first ever mobile call was made 50 years ago in the United States. Half a century later, cell phones have become powerful machines capable of causing anxiety and depression. In the future, they will save lives, says the man known as the “father of the mobile phone”. But, for the moment, Martin Cooper’s advice is different: “stop looking at the screens”.
On April 3, 1973, New Yorkers passing by on 6th Avenue were surprised by a man in the street talking to a “brick” pressed to his ear. “Joel, this is Martin Cooper. I’m calling from a cell phone. But a handheld, personal, portable phone.” The recipient of the first call from a mobile phone was Joel Engel, an engineer at Bell System, an American company that had been racing with Cooper’s Motorola to develop a portable phone since the mid-1960s.
Cooper used a mobile phone that weighed over a kilogram. It was about 10 inches long and had a battery life of 25 minutes. The Motorola engineer went down to the street to test the prototype, nicknamed DynaTAC (acronym for Total Area Dynamic and Adaptive Coverage), and made a call using the network provided by an antenna at the company’s headquarters in New York.
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