Today it is so commonplace to see people walking along a street speaking into their mobile phones that it's hardly worthy of a mention. Yet, 50 years ago this would most definitely not have been the case. So, imagine how it must have looked on the 3 April, 1973 when Dr Martin Cooper of Motorola, walked along Sixth Avenue in New York, stopped outside the Hilton Hotel, took a most unusual object out of his coat, and proceeded to make a telephone call. Back in 1973, anyone wishing to make a telephone call away from their home or office had two options - either to use a radiophone fitted to their car or, more likely, step inside a phone box. This, then, was something quite different, for what Dr Cooper had in his hand was a Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone and he was making the world's first cellular telephone call. The recipient of that ground-breaking call was Joel Engel, a Department Head at Bell Telephone Laboratories - a rather cheeky choice as in 1947 a team from Bell Telephone Laboratories had published a paper entitled, 'Mobile Telephony - Wide Area Coverage' that set out a completely new way of designing mobile radio networks based on the concept of re-using frequencies distributed across a series of small geographic areas called cells. Unfortunately, their idea couldn't be realised by the technology of the day but 26 years later (1973), Martin Cooper was calling their Department Head to announce that Motorola had made it work!
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