On the line with Martin Cooper, inventor of the very first cell phone

Photos Jeff Antenore

Fifty years ago, Martin Cooper stood on a Manhattan street corner, pulled out a mammoth transmitter-like contraption, punched in a few numbers and dialed his competitor — who became the first-ever recipient of a cellular call. The disgruntled colleague shouldn’t have been too upset, though. Half a century later, he’s surely carrying an offshoot of that phone in his pocket. And as for 95-year-old Marty Cooper? He’s still trying to make the world a better place

Martin Cooper is the fellow who cut the cord, who unshackled humanity from the limitations of the telephone wire, who bequeathed the world with one of the top ten inventions of the 20th century.

It’s been 50 years since that day in April of 1973, when Marty Cooper, then an engineer at a tenacious technology company called Motorola, and head of its communications division, stood on a Manhattan streetcorner, punched a phone number into a large box with a digit panel that looked like the then-ultra-modern push-button phones, and put it to his ear while passersby wondered what on earth he was doing with that mammoth contraption.

Cooper dialed the number of Joel Engel, his counterpart at Motorola’s rival Bell Laboratories, the research division of AT&T. He couldn’t wait to hear Joel’s expression when he’d pick up.

The year before, Bell Labs had decided to double down on an engineering track to create a car phone in what it believed was the communication model of the future, but Cooper was worried. He didn’t want to see a phone tethered to a car as the standard of mobile communication — he believed it would be possible for a phone to be an extension of a person, who shouldn’t be relegated to being next to a wire on the wall or sitting in a car while connecting to another person. Cooper, for his part, set out to create a mobile phone that could fit in a person’s pocket. Within a year, his team had the first working cellphone system — an amazing feat of engineering, even if that early clunker couldn’t quite fit into a pocket or purse.

“Joel,” Cooper spoke into the box, “this is Marty. I’m calling you from a real handheld, portable cell phone.”

Cooper doesn’t remember Joel’s exact response, but he knew Bell Labs was pretty annoyed. At the time, Motorola was a small player on the fringe of AT&T’s monopoly, and they thought it was impertinent for a company like Motorola to go after them and compete on their turf.

While it took another ten years for the first commercial cellular phone service to begin operating in the US (the Motorola Dynatac 8000X, released in 1983, took ten hours to fully charge for 30 minutes of talk time and cost $4,000, plus 50 cents per minute of talking), and portable mobile phones didn’t make significant inroads with consumers until the early 1990s, Cooper’s Dynatac prototype was a technological breakthrough for Motorola, helping it achieve its goal of winning FCC permission for private companies to operate a wireless communications network over radio frequencies.