Behind the invention of the first personal mobile phone that could be carried on the street there was something more than the technological elements that made it up: a profound change in concept. Until then, sites were called. From that moment on, and although mobile telephony would still take decades to become popular, people began to be called.
Today, Monday, April 3, marks the 50th anniversary since the first call was made on the street using a handheld mobile device. It took place on Sixth Avenue in New York and its protagonist is Martin (Marty) Cooper, a Motorola engineer who, when giving a demonstration to the summoned journalists, did not know who to call, until it occurred to him that it would be nice to tease a little. to the competition.
The recipient of the call was a colleague from a rival company, Joel Engel, who ran AT
The phone Cooper used was a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC. To get that call, the company had to first install antennas connected to a radio base station on the roof of Burlington House and AT’s landline phone system.
The call was a success, but no one understood the concept of cell phones very well at that time, much less imagined that an era had just begun in which mobile phones were going to become powerful multimedia computers capable of performing tasks that would have seemed impossible and magical, like the internet –which did not exist–, GPS satellite tracking or also being a camera.
At the end of that call from the street, Motorola engineers and executives went with the journalists to a nearby hotel, where they were allowed to test the invention. Most of the informants took the opportunity to call her newsroom, but an Australian journalist asked if she could call her mother directly from the street in Australia. She answered yes and they did the test. It worked on the first call attempt.
Motorola explained that it had applied to the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for authorization to build a mobile communications network that it planned to launch in 1976, but it would take 10 years.
The Motorola DynaTac 8000x, which soon became known as the brick, went on sale in 1984. Its price was $3,995, equivalent to about $10,000 today. It weighed 800 grams and had a small LED character display. To charge its battery it took 8 hours, although the company sold an accessory charger that reduced the charging time to one hour.
Suitcase-type mobiles had already existed since the 1940s, generally associated with installation in vehicles and for a corporate market. The vision of the Motorola engineer was very different. Cooper understood that the telephone should be able to be assigned to a person and not to a place, as was the case until then.
In 2005, confusion arose over the source of Cooper’s inspiration. In the documentary How William Shatner Changed the World, the actor who played Captain Kirk in the science fiction series Star Trek explained some advances in the future with engineers and scientists.
Cooper agreed more than necessary – he was carried away by the producers of the series – to point to Star Trek as his inspiration for mobile telephony, which caused this hoax to circulate for years that the engineer himself has been denying. The series debuted on NBC in 1966, but the first research on mobile phones dates back to 1946.
