Those humble beginnings were soon forgotten. "We'd just cut the cord," says Windmill, "We'd got access to voice communication and very little else on those very early devices in the 1970s and 80s." You wouldn't put it in your pocket very easily."Īt that stage, the function of mobile phones was to stand in for landlines, says Christopher Windmill, a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Derby. "It wasn't a brick at that stage, but it was a half-brick. "I could get my fingers round it," says Haddon. Leslie Haddon, a lecturer in media and technology at the London School of Economics, was an early adopter, paying £300 (roughly $500 at the time) in the late 1980s for a Motorola. The first iterations were expensive and cumbersome. But the era of the mobile phone had begun – and it is an era in which the devices have profoundly changed our lives. It took another 10 years for the device to become available to consumers. Though the US government was supportive of the project, there were many technical and regulatory challenges. Cooper's triumphant call to Engel was the first handheld mobile phone call. It was not an elegant device, but it had facilitated a landmark moment. And they have changed our lives profoundly – sometimes in unexpected ways.Ĭooper's prototype phone was brick-shaped and beige, with a large antenna and no screen. But while mobile phones transformed the way our species communicates with one another, it barely scratches the surface of what they have enabled.įifty years after that seminal call by Cooper, mobile phones are now extraordinarily multi-functional. The ability to beam short text messages, and later pictures and eventually emojis, would then follow. Soon it would be possible to hold conversations with another person – and even multiple people at once – from anywhere at any time. Standing in front of reporters and photographers, Cooper had made the call from in front of the Hilton Midtown hotel on New York's Sixth Avenue – around 30 miles (48km) from Bell Labs in New Jersey where Engel stood silently on the other end. "A personal, handheld, portable cellphone." " I'm calling you on a cellphone, but a real cellphone," Cooper said. It was Martin 'Marty' Cooper, the leader of a rival research group at a radio and electronics company called Motorola. "Hi, Joel," said the voice at the other end of the line. On 3 April, however, the landline in Engel's laboratory rang. His team were now trying to take the technology a step further – a device that could be carried around everywhere. Research at Bell Labs, where Engel worked, had several decades earlier contributed to the development of clunky, car-phones that allowed calls to be made on the move. Joel Engel, an American engineer who had worked on Nasa's Apollo programme, was leading an effort to create the world's first handheld mobile phone.
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