First-ever mobile phone call made 50 years ago today

The mobile phone revolution was ignited on a street corner in New York City, with a cheeky call to a rival, after years of research.

The first-ever mobile phone call was made on 3 April 1973, by Motorola engineer Marty Cooper, while standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue in New York City. He rang a rival at Bell Laboratories, who had been endeavouring to build a car-based mobile phone, to triumphantly tell him that he was calling from “a personal, handheld, portable cell phone”.

Cooper’s goal, in his own words, was “something that would represent an individual, so you could assign a number not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home, but to a person.”

A version of Cooper’s ground-breaking prototype mobile phone would eventually go on sale to the public as the Motorola DynaTac 8000X – the infamous ‘brick phone’ of the 1980s. That phone weighed a chonky 790g, had 30 minutes of talk time and took 10 hours to charge the battery! A Motorola DynaTac 8000X is part of the collection at the Mobile Phone Museum, sponsored by Vodafone.