Hello Sarah and Abraham! Mobile telephony is fifty years old

By admin On Apr 3, 2023

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New York, April 3, 1973. Motorola’s Martin Cooper uses this historic moment, the first phone call ever, to call who? Indeed, a competitor. This milestone is now half a century ago.

Martin Cooper with Motorola DynaTAC
in April 1973 (photo: Businessweek)

It was an almost dry day, with a temperature of around 12 degrees. Cooper, then 44 years old, was standing in the middle of the street with the Motorola DynaTAC, a 1.2kg brick of a phone with lousy battery life. The buttons also had a different layout than is now usual: numbers were arranged in pairs in a row instead of three, as is now the case on keypads.

Cooper called competitor Joel Engel of Bell Labs, who was also working on a mobile phone, to say, of course, that Motorola had succeeded in making a working mobile phone. That moment is considered the beginning of technology and the beginning of the mobile market as we know it today.

You can doubt whether that is really the case. After all, seventy years before that, the now unknown Nathan Stubblefield laid already a connection to something that you can call similar with a mobile phone without wires, at least, tweaker Killer already said ten years ago.

Mobile telephony as we know it today started in the 1990s with the arrival of GSM networks, which we now refer to as 2G. The peak was in the following years and with the arrival of the smartphone, the importance of mobile calling has already declined in favor of mobile internet. The circuit-switched mobile phone networks have all been replaced by IP networks.

Martin Cooper himself is alive and is now 94 years old. In addition to his invention, he also defined a kind of Moore’s Law for mobile communication. While the recently deceased Gordon Moore talked about the number of transistors on a chip doubling, Cooper claimed that the number of calls or the amount of data that can be sent in the usable spectrum doubles every 2.5 years. That law, also in the mobile market, is not nearly as well known as Moore’s law.