Have you ever thought about the beginnings of mobile telephony? Well, let’s look back. April 3, 1973 near the Hilton Manhattan Hotel in New York. Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, is about to make history and he knows it. The reporters accompany Cooper as he opens the briefcase and pulls out an amazing device, a prototype at this point, with a truly amazing design that would take some time to be available to users. When everything was ready, he turned on the device, dialed the phone number, waited a few seconds and said the following:

“Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone”

Joel was Joel Engel, an engineer who worked at the fabled Bell Labs, which was owned by AT&T at the time. It is not known for certain what Engel replied, but it is believed that he was silent and slow to respond because Motorola and Cooper did not expect him to win the race for the first commercial cell phone. A career that began decades earlier, precisely at Bell Labs, when she formally proposed the idea of ​​a mobile cell phone system, an alternative to cell phones for vehicles, a Motorola specialty. The goal of both cell phone companies was to create a truly portable system.

So this call (which wasn’t actually the first since the prototype had obviously been tested in the lab before and incidentally with the anecdote that the wrong number was dialed by mistake), yes, it was the first one to be published and which showed an extraordinary advance in communications and was a milestone on Motorola’s scoreboard, making the milestone the benchmark for mobile telephony in the United States for many years.

But the rollout of cell phone technology was just the beginning. The prototype used by Cooper in the April 3, 1973 challenge weighed more than two kilograms, when the company’s goal for the production of the final model was to place it under a kilogram, around 800 grams. In addition, the cellular network necessary to provide service to the phones that were due to arrive had to be deployed.

As a result, it would still take more than ten years for this prototype to be developed DynaTAC 8000xthe first mobile phone in history which Commercialization began on March 13, 1984.Although at this point we have to remember that there were previous attempts, but the FCC, the American communications regulator, previously excluded some models that did not meet the security considerations set by the agency.

Today we have flat rate calling plans as well as offers to get cell phones at very low prices or even for free, but obviously this wasn’t always the case. The first carriers to offer cellular service for the DynaTAC 8000x were AT&T and US Cellular. a price that hovered around 50 cents per minute. Of course, this was not a problem for its users, as they previously did not have to pay anything less than $3,995 at the timewhich, taking into account accumulated inflation, would be about 10,500 euros (in case you thought the iPhone Pro Max was expensive…).

Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko on Wall Street. For many people, it was the first time they saw a mobile phone associated with power and success.

The first mobile phone was an absolute sales success (yes, despite the price) as it was massively adopted by politicians, businessmen and high-ranking executives who greatly appreciated the “large” autonomy it offered with respect to briefcase-type models. as the well-remembered Ericsson HotLine. Why did I put great in quotes? You can fully understand this knowing that it offered a range of 30 minutes of talk time and 8 hours of standby time on a full charge, and that it required at least 10 hours to charge the battery to 100%.

C.fifty years since the first mobile call and almost forty years since the arrival of the first mobile device on the market, with an integrated battery, are little more than breath, but breath very well used in the electronics and telecommunications industry. The evolution of devices, networks and services is spectacular and makes us wonder how we will remember today’s mobile telephony and telecommunications in fifty years. It’s hard to believe that such a remarkable evolution can happen, but then again, we’re talking about technology, a field that has grown exponentially.

Not everything was for the better, yes, because in an exercise in nostalgia, I started looking for more information about the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, a direct descendant of the phone used in the April 3, 1973 call, just to confirm that it did. It was very big, it was very expensive, battery life was very short and everything else… but yes, the charger is included.