New cellphones appear practically every month, and have evolve drastically over the decades. These devices promote an array of features that was once thought only to exist in sci-fi movies. As we journey into a future, innovation in this market has shown us that nothing impossible; but sometimes we need to know where we’ve been in order to see where we’re heading. So let’s take this chance to take a look at the cellphone that started it all.
Dr. Martin Coooper
Motorola was the first to engineer the cell phone. Motorola’s General Manager at the time, Dr. Martin Cooper, invented the cellphone and made the first mobile phone call on the street of New York in April 1973. Unlike today, a guy talking on a portable phone had people astonished as they stared at Dr. Cooper roaming the streets talking into this mysterious unit (kind of like when Bluetooth headset were first introduced and people look like crazy people talking to themselves). This guy must have had a great sense of humour since he made the first phone call to his rival Dr. Joel S. Engel, Head of Research at AT&T Bell Laboratories, who was trying to create the exact same thing.
Motorola release the first commercial cellphone, the Motorola DynaTac 8000x, in 1983. At a grand price tag of $3,995 US, the DynaTAC weighed 2.5 pounds and was 10 inches tall (sans antenna). You might have seen this phone on the 1990s sitcom Saved By The Bell. Zack Morris, the main character on the show, had the Motorola phone on the show now dubbed the ‘Zack Morris Phone’.
So there you have it, a little walk down memory lane. To closes off this session, here’s a video below of Mark-Paul Gosselaar, aka Zack Morris, on the Jimmy Fallon Show…
…and for kicks I thought I would throw in this cool video on the evolution of the cellphone: