Today, the mobile phone celebrates its 50th anniversary, because on April 3, 1973, the first calls were made with such a device. The first mobile phones were the size of a brick and popular with stockbrokers. Nowadays, powerful minicomputers are in every pocket.
50 years ago, engineer Martin Cooper, who works for the American company Motorola in New York, made the first phone call with a mobile phone. Cooper calls Joel Engel, a competitor, with a cell phone called DynaTAC. However, it will be another ten years before the first mobile phone comes on the market.
The problem with cell phones is that people stare too much at their screens, the “father of cell phones” is currently saying. However, Cooper believes in the potential of mobile phones to help people, for example in medicine. But right now, many people are too fixated on the devices. “It breaks me when I see someone looking at his phone while crossing the street. That’s crazy,” says the 94-year-old to AFP news agency.
Team worked for three months – day and night
In 1972, Cooper decided to create a device that could be used anywhere. His team of experts in semiconductors, transistors, filters and antennas worked day and night for three months until they made a breakthrough at the end of March and introduced the DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) mobile phone covers).
“The phone weighed more than a kilogram and the battery only lasted 25 minutes. But anyway, it was so heavy you couldn’t hold it to your ear for 25 minutes,” says Cooper. “So I was on Sixth Avenue[in New York]and suddenly I got the inspiration to call my counterpart at Bell, Joel Engel. And I said, ‘Joel, this is Martin Cooper… I’m calling you here on a cell phone. But from a real mobile phone that is portable and that you can hold in your hand.’ silence on the other side. I think he gritted his teeth.”
The first cell phone cost $4,000
In 1983, Motorola began selling the DynaTAC 8000X in the US for $3995. The device, nicknamed “Brick”, weighs nearly a kilogram and measures 33 centimeters. Then, on December 3, 1992, Vodafone employee Richard Jarvis received the first text message: “Merry Christmas.” In 2021, this post will be auctioned as a digital collectible in the form of an NFT for $150,000.
The last major innovation came on April 5, 2019, when South Korea became the first country to introduce the 5G standard, which promises even faster internet. The South Korean Samsung and the Chinese manufacturer Huawei will launch smartphones with a foldable screen in 2019.
Source: Krone
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