Motorola engineer, Martin Cooper made the first call from a cell phone on April 3, 1973, in New York,
On April 3, 1973, in New York, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first call from a cell phone, although according to his own words, inventing it was easier than deciding who to make that first historic call to. Until the late 19th century, wireless communication was mainly used by the maritime industry, but in the early 20th century, the first steps were taken for land use. Police forces, firefighters, banks, and stock exchanges were among the first to adopt it. In 1946, the United States became the first country to offer this service to private users. AT&T marketed the 6-channel Mobile Telephone System and in 1968 introduced the 44-channel Improved Mobile Telephone Service, but these were still fixed-frequency transmitters, meaning each phone was a radio station for a specific area.
In 1947, Douglas Ring, an engineer at Bell Labs, presented the concept of the “Cellular” phone to AT&T executives. The complex system was based on dividing the territory into cells, each with an antenna to more efficiently use the spectrum and reuse the same frequency in several zones simultaneously. The challenge was that the phones had to operate at very high frequencies, and when a user moved from one cell to another, the system needed to detect the change and seamlessly connect the frequencies in real-time to avoid dropping the call. Managing such a volume of information—user, origin cell, destination cell, and detecting location changes—required handling a massive database, unmanageable at the time, which delayed the real possibility of implementation by more than 20 years.
By the late 1960s, major telecommunications companies were racing to be the first to implement the system. It seemed that Bell Labs at AT&T, led by Joel Engel, would be the winners, but something unexpected happened. Martin Cooper, an experienced and outgoing Motorola engineer, beat his competitors by inventing the DynaTAC 8000X, a bulky and extremely heavy phone that, despite its awkwardness, worked. The company scheduled an ostentatious presentation at the Hilton Hotel in New York, but Cooper wanted to make sure the first official call had been made and avoid any embarrassment from a failed test. Motorola approved his plan, but since this was a historic communication, the question remained: who to call? The president? A TV channel? When Cooper revealed whom he wanted to call, no one approved of his idea, but he went ahead anyway.
On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper walked out onto the street on his way to the Hilton Hotel. He walked a few blocks along Sixth Avenue, pulled out his bulky device, and dialed the number for Bell Labs at AT&T, his technological adversary. When they answered, he asked to be connected to Joel Engel. Engel picked up the phone and was stunned when Cooper said, “I’m calling you from the first cell phone in history. In 10 minutes, turn on your TV; you’ll see me presenting it at the Hilton.”
*Chismesito Tv
