In 1973, Dr Martin Cooper made world’s first mobile phone call to his rival at Bell Labs; but all he heard back was silence as …

​On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Dr Martin Cooper made what is widely recognised as the first mobile phone call. Standing on a New York City street, Cooper called Joel Engel, an engineer at Bell Laboratories and his rival in the race to develop mobile communications. Cooper told Engel he was calling from a “personal, handheld portable cell phone,” but all he heard back was silence as he presumed his competitor had been left speechless.​The call came as Motorola and Bell Laboratories were pursuing different approaches to mobile communications. Bell Labs was working on car-based phones, while Cooper and Motorola were developing a device a person could carry. By making the call in the middle of a street rather than from a vehicle, Cooper demonstrated the idea of a truly portable mobile phone.​

The history of the first mobile phone call

​In the 1970s, Bell Laboratories was developing mobile phones designed for use inside cars. Motorola was pursuing a different approach that would allow people to carry their phones with them.​Cooper’s 1973 call was made using an early prototype that would eventually lead to the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. The first mobile phone sold to consumers did not arrive until 1984, more than a decade after Cooper made his call.​The DynaTAC 8000X was considerably different from the phones people use today. It could provide around 30 minutes of talk time, required about 10 hours to recharge and weighed roughly 1.7 pounds. Its price was also high, equivalent to about $11,700 in today’s money.​The 1973 demonstration was therefore not a consumer product launch. It showed that a mobile phone could operate independently of a vehicle and be carried by an individual.​

Why Martin Cooper called his Bell Labs rival

​Cooper later explained that the call had a broader purpose beyond the competition between Motorola and Bell Labs. In a 2013 BGR interview marking the 40th anniversary of the call, he said his goal was to prevent AT&T, which owned Bell Laboratories at the time, from “creating a monopoly in the cell phones. And not only that, but a monopoly in car telephones.”​Cooper acknowledged that AT&T had invented cellular technology in 1947, but said Motorola did not want the company to become the sole provider once mobile phones reached consumers. “We thought the world was ready for the freedom you get in having personal communications. And we sure didn’t want to get put out of business.”​The rivalry between the two companies was therefore connected to how mobile communications would develop and who would control the emerging market.​Cooper later acknowledged that the call also had a competitive element. In 2023, he told NPR that he was “not averse to rubbing [Engel’s] nose in our achievement.”​The exchange took place when mobile communications were still largely experimental. The phone Cooper used was bulky by modern standards and had limited battery life, but the call demonstrated that a person could make a wireless call without being connected to a vehicle.​More than five decades later, mobile phones have evolved from large devices designed primarily for voice calls into computers used for messaging, photography, navigation, internet access and other functions. Cooper’s 1973 call to Engel marked an early step in that transition.