When was the first cell phone invented?

How was the first cell phone invented?

• Answer:

  Dr Martin Cooper, a former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, is considered the inventor of the first portable handset and the first person to make a call on a portable cell phone in April 1973. The first call he made was to his rival, Joel Engel, Bell Labs head of research. AT&T's research arm, Bell Laboratories, introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947. But Motorola and Bell Labs in the sixties and early seventies were in a race to incorporate the technology into portable devices. Cooper, now 70, wanted people to be able to carry their phones with them anywhere. While he was a project manager at Motorola in 1973, Cooper set up a base station in New York with the first working prototype of a cellular telephone, the Motorola Dyna-Tac. After some initial testing in Washington for the F.C.C., Mr. Cooper and Motorola took the phone technology to New York to show the public. In 1973, when the company installed the base station to handle the first public demonstration of a phone call over the cellular network, Motorola was trying to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to allocate frequency space to private companies for use in the emerging technology of cellular communications. After some initial testing in Washington for the F.C.C., Mr. Cooper and Motorola took the phone technology to New York to show the public. On April 3, 1973, standing on a street near the Manhattan Hilton, Mr. Cooper decided to attempt a private call before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. He picked up the 2-pound Motorola handset called the Dyna-Tac and pushed the "off hook" button. The phone came alive, connecting Mr. Cooper with the base station on the roof of the Burlington Consolidated Tower (now the Alliance Capital Building) and into the land-line system. To the bewilderment of some passers-by, he dialed the number and held the phone to his ear. According to an Associated Press Article in the April 12th issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Cell Phone was invented by Dr. Martin Cooper who at that time was a vice-president at Motorola. The article states that he made the first cell-phone call in 1973 on a street corner in New York using a base station at the top of a tall building in that city. He called an acquaintance at AT&T who at that time was a rival and perhaps said something like "we've done it". Motorola introduced its cell phone in 1983 after five generations, 15 years, and $ 90 million, however the first commercial cell phone service was started by NTT in Japan on December 3, 1979. This is by no means the whole story, however. Cooper himself states that "Bell Labs had invented this thing called cellular technology". What Martin Cooper apparently did was build a relatively small radio telephone which could be carried by a person. He did not develop the idea and the mechanism for automatically switching over when a phone went from one cell to another. The true inventor of the cell phone is the person or group who developed the concept of small cells and implemented the automatic switchover system, and this was Bell Labs. If the FCC had not limited the number of channels available for radio telephones to 23, Bell Labs would not have been under intense pressure to develop the cellular concept. Finally the explosion of cellular technology which we now see around us today was caused by the Microprocessor, i.e. a computer on a small single chip. This was primarily pioneered by Intel although Motorola and AMD, ARM have played significant roles. Today cell phone usage outpaces land line usage with a recent study done by Strategy Analytics claiming that 1.1 Billion cell phones were sold in 2007. Wowee!