First mobile phone call

Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first handheld mobile phone call on 3 April 1973 on a New York street. He called a rival engineer at Bell Labs.

Context

Martin Cooper led Motorola's effort to build a portable phone and used a prototype of what became the DynaTAC. It was a heavy handset, about a kilogram, with a battery that gave only a few tens of minutes of talk time. The call was placed on a street in Manhattan, over a cellular base station Motorola had set up for the demonstration.

The person he phoned was Joel Engel, who led cellular research at Bell Labs, a competitor in the race to build mobile networks. Cooper has told the story many times, and details such as the exact wording of the call come from his own recollection rather than a recording.

The date is well documented as 3 April 1973. It was a demonstration, not a commercial service. The first commercially available handset, the DynaTAC 8000X, reached shoppers only in 1983, after more than a decade of further development and regulatory work, at a price of several thousand dollars. Cooper has said the team wanted to show that people should be able to call a person, not a place, which shaped how portable phones were later seen.