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When was the first mobile phone call made?

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Quick Answer

Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call on 3 April 1973 on a New York City street.

The Full Story

On 3 April 1973, Martin Cooper stood on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and called Joel Engel, a rival engineer at Bell Labs, using a prototype Motorola DynaTAC. The phone weighed about 1.1 kilograms, was roughly 23 centimetres long and offered around 30 minutes of talk time after a 10-hour charge. It took another decade for a commercial version to reach the market. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X went on sale in 1983 for about 3,995 dollars, which is over 12,000 dollars in today’s money. Today there are more mobile subscriptions on Earth than there are people.

Key Facts

1.The first commercial cellular network launched in Japan in 1979.
2.The first text message, Merry Christmas, was sent in December 1992.
3.The DynaTAC was nicknamed the brick because of its size.

YouTube Angle

Suggested video title for this topic:

"The Brick That Started It All — The First Mobile Phone Call"