38 years ago: first mobile phone call

According to a lot of posts I've read, the history of cellphones all started back on April 3rd, 1973 when Martin Cooper made the first ever phone call while walking in the streets of New York. As pointed out in this article, there weren't cordless phones at that time. 


Martin Cooper is a man with a great sense of humour: one of his first calls was to his rival at AT&T Bell Labs (Cooper was working for Motorola).

"The battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn't really a big problem because you couldn't hold that phone up for that long". 

No kidding. At that time, mobile meant you had to carry around a 2 kg 'bricklike' handset. People would have to wait for another 10 years before even thinking of getting one. Oh yes, and the price was some $ 3,995 in 1983 dollars. Let's enjoy together how Motorola promoted their products at the time with this 80s cellphone commercial:

Spotted on Mashable - 10 Hilarious Vintage Cellphone Commercials by Amy-Mae Elliott