When Martin Cooper made his first cellphone call on April 3, 1973, the phone that he made the call on — the DynaTAC 8000x that he had invented — was much different than modern day smartphone technology.
Weighing two and a half pounds and only staying charged for about 20 minutes on average, Cooper and his team at Motorola had created a fully wireless phone that could be used outside.
During a speaking engagement at San Diego State’s Digital Humanities Center on April 17, Cooper discussed his personal career and the history behind mobile device technology.
In the 1960s, AT&T was advocating for the Federal Communications Commission to approve car telephones, not believing that completely mobile phones would be a necessary or viable alternative to landlines.
“What (AT&T) decided was what we wanted were car telephones,” Cooper said. “Could you imagine? We’d been trapped in our homes and offices with this wire, and they were going to solve our problem by trapping us in our cars.”
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