Today is the 35th anniversary of the first mobile phone call.
On April 3rd, 1973 Dr. Martin Cooper, Motorola’s Corporate Director of R&D and patent holder for the “Radio Telephone System”, used the DynaTAC handset to make the first ever portable phone call. Who did he call? Joel Engel, Head of Research at Bell Labs and his rival in the field, to let him know he was too late! I’m not sure I could’ve resisted making that call in his place.
Photo: Eric Risberg/AP
Last year it emerged Cooper only began working on portable communications because of an episode of Star Trek -
“Suddenly there was Captain Kirk talking on his communicator. Talking! With no wires!”
“To the rest of the world it was a fantasy. To me it was an objective.”
In the same article you discover Cooper is not alone in having Kirk and co as his muses:
Robert Haitani, the designer of the Palm Pilot, revealed to the San Francisco Chronicle, “my first sketches were influenced by the Enterprise bridge panels…Years later the first Treo (a combo phone and wireless PDA) had a form factor similar to the communicator. You could stand there and talk into it like Captain Kirk.”
