On April 3, 1973 Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola made the first cell phone in Manhattan. He called one of his rivals, an engineer at AT & T. Both companies were working on the development of a phone that could not only be used in a car and but which people could actually carry around with them.
The first phone was the size of a brick. It weighed more than a kilogram and was 25 cm tall. It took over ten hours to charge the battery, which lasted only half an hour.
It took the industry almost a decade to produce portable phones that the public could use. In the 1990s cell phones became smaller and cheaper .
Since then a lot has changed. While older models could only be used for voice communication, today’s smartphones are small computers with a variety of features, ranging from built-in cameras, jukeboxes to digital payment services.
It is estimated that there are over 7 billion cell phones in use around the world.
Motorola DynaTAC 8000X from 1984
Image: Redrum0486, CC BY-SA 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons
