On April 3, 1973, Dr. Martin Cooper made a telephone call to AT&T’s Bell Labs from his office at Motorola. The noteworthy bit about this telephone call? It wasn’t simply teasing the competition, it was a noteworthy achievement. Forty years ago, the first cellular telephone call was made.
That phone is the Motorola DynaTAC, which was officially introduced to the mass marker in 1983, a full decade after the initial phone call was made using a prototype. The first DynaTAC, dubbed the 8000x, weighed a staggering 1.75 pounds. It offered 30 minutes of talk time and 8 hours of standby, giving it battery life the first generation of iPhone would be envious of. It was the first cell phone that could connect with the phone network without the aid of an operator for phonecalls, was portable, and lasted until 1994 with continual changes and improvements.
Among the accessories were a leather zippered case with a metal belt clip, a one-hour desktop charger (that sometimes broke the phone batteries and shorted the phone out), and a swiveling brass antenna, which might be the coolest accessory ever invented.
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