The world changed 50 years ago, taking its first step with a phone call that worked just as well as a joke between technological experts. This is the story of Martin Cooper and the anniversary of the first use of a mobile phone half a century ago.
It was a day April 3, 1973 when an electronic engineer from Motorola decided to take to the streets with his new invention: a device that weighed more than a kilo, with obscene dimensions, typical of a kitchen blender and a battery that barely it lasted 20 minutes. It was the first mobile phone in history.
The name of the engineer, as you can deduce, is Martin CooperAlso known as Marty Cooper. Born in December 1928 in the city of Chicago, Right on the cusp of the Great Depression lived through some of the toughest transitions of the modern era, but had the chance to make history, with one of the most significant trolleys of all time.
This was the first mobile call made by Martin Cooper in 1973
The setting was the streets of New York City, the victim was the Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of AT&T’s Bell Labs, colleague and rival Cooper Tech. The move was masterful and accurate: with the help of an antenna mounted on the roof of the Motorola building, Cooper made the call to his competitor from his mobile phone while walking down the street, a few meters before reaching the Hilton Hotel, where he I would give the official announcement of the performance of his new creation, changing history, crushing his competition, receiving the glory.
The truth is that 50 years after the first mobile call, it is very likely that Cooper would never imagine the dimensions that the industry to which it gave rise would acquire. In 1975, two years after his invention, there was all over the world 5,000 cell phone userscurrently that number exceeds by a wide margin the 6.8 billion.
In this blog we can talk or speculate about the next big leap that will take Apple, Samsung or Motorola. We are even a few days away from the guys from Cupertino presenting what would be their first Virtual Reality device, in theory.
But the reality is that all this related: our relatively enslaving mobile present, with the power of smartphones and the quality of keeping us always connected, we owe it to that great achievement of Martin Cooper made on April 3, 1973.