August 25, 2022 – First Handheld Mobile Phone Call

It’s another Throwback Thursday, and today we’re featuring the year 1973. That’s the year that the very first ever handheld mobile phone call was made! It was made by Martin Cooper, the head of Motorola’s communications systems division, in New York City on April 3, 1973.
Cooper’s vision for the first cell phone was inspired by Dick Tracy’s wrist radio. Motorola supported his concept, and invested $100 million between 1973 and 1993. The original phone was called the DynaTAC8000x. It weighed 2 1/2 pounds and was 10 inches long. The phone only had 30 minutes of talk time before you needed to recharge it – which took 10 hours.
On April 3, 1973, Cooper demonstrated 2 working phones to the media and passers-by on the streets of Manhattan. Standing on 6th Avenue, he made the first call – to his rival at AT&T. When the DynaTAC was released in 1983, it cost $3,995. That’s $10,420 today!
Motorola also introduced the first flip phone in 1989. The first text message was sent at Vodafone’s office Christmas party in 1992. It simply read “Merry Christmas!”. The first smartphone was introduced in 1994 by IBM. Called the IBM Simon, it featured apps and a touch screen – although it looks nothing like what we’d consider a smartphone today!
On average, American’s check their phone 344 times a day. That’s about every 4 minutes. 74% of us feel uneasy leaving our phones at home, and we spend an average of 2 hours and 54 on our phones each day. That comes out to around 44 days a year spent on our phones. Learn more here.