{"id":399000,"date":"2026-04-18T17:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T17:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/399000\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T17:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T17:18:08","slug":"first-cell-phone-call-made-more-than-half-a-century-ago-this-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/399000\/","title":{"rendered":"First Cell Phone Call Made More Than Half a Century Ago This Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FirstCooper holding a DynaTAC cellphone in 2007. Credit: Rico Shen<\/a>, CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>\/Wikipedia<\/p>\n

On April 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer made the first cell phone call in history from a sidewalk on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan with a device the size of a brick.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m calling you on a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a personal, handheld, portable cell phone,\u201d Cooper said on the phone to Joel Engel, head of AT&T-owned Bell Labs.<\/p>\n

Even though the typical customer would not have access to cell phones<\/a> for ten more years, anybody passing by Cooper on the street that day may have witnessed history being created.<\/p>\n

Over the five decades that have passed since that initial conversation, Cooper\u2019s large, heavy gadget has changed and been superseded by an array of speedier, slimmer phones that are now commonplace, changing entire businesses, societies, and our own personal relationships.<\/p>\n

Although some may have been taken aback by the sheer scope and influence of cell phones, Cooper claimed that it was always likely that a large portion of humanity will eventually consider them to be necessities.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was not surprised that everybody has a cell phone,\u201d Cooper, now 95, told CNN recently. \u201cWe used to tell the story then that someday when you\u2019re born you would be assigned a phone number. If you didn\u2019t answer the phone, you would die.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rise of the cell phone<\/p>\n

After Cooper\u2019s first call, manufacturing issues and government regulation slowed the progress of bringing the phone to the public, he said.<\/p>\n

It would take a decade for a version of that DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) phone to hit the market, for a hefty $3,900. The phone, similar to the one Gordon Gekko wielded in the movie \u201cWall Street,\u201d weighed 2.5 pounds and was about a foot tall.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until the 1990s that the modern cell phone took off, as it shrunk way down in size and became much more user-friendly. Today, 97 percent of Americans own a cell phone of some kind, according to a study by Pew Research Center.<\/a><\/p>\n

In the years since that first call, Cooper has written a book on the transformational power of the cell phone, started companies and done speaking tours and media appearances.<\/p>\n

An iPhone user<\/a> himself (and a Samsung user before that), he loves using his Apple Watch to track his swimming activity and connect his hearing aids to his phone.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m an optimist. I know there are disadvantages to the cell phone. We do have people that get addicted to it. We have people walking across the street talking on their cell phones,\u201d Cooper told CNN.<\/p>\n

\u201cOverall, I think the cell phone has changed humanity for the better and that will continue in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related:\u00a0Greeks Spent 4.6 Billion Hours on Mobile Phones<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cooper holding a DynaTAC cellphone in 2007. Credit: Rico Shen, CC BY-SA 3.0\/Wikipedia On April 1973, Martin Cooper,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[133522,189229,124590,85,46,189230,22679,20824,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-399000","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-cell-phone","9":"tag-first-cell-phone-call","10":"tag-greek-news","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-martin-cooper","14":"tag-mobile-phone","15":"tag-motorola","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}