Motorola engineer Martin Cooper will go down in the history books as the first person to place a public cellular call on April 3rd, 1973. This historic event was arranged by Motorola to show off its new cellular calling technology to the FCC. At that time, Motorola has a vision for the cellular future and needed the FCC to allocate a frequency band to make the idea of cellular communications come to life.
To publicize the usefulness of this technology, Motorola decided to publicly showcase this technology in front of the FCC and other bigwigs. Motorola set up an antenna tower and base station on top of the Alliance Capital Building in New York City. Cooper placed his call while walking the streets of NYC in front of the New York Hilton hotel. He called Dr. Jeol S. Engel who was the head of research at Bell Labs. As part of this demo, Cooper reportedly handed the cell phone to journalists so they could confirm the phone actually worked and was not a hoax.
The phone used in this first public demonstration was the now famous Motorola DynaTAC, a 2.2-lb monstrosity that boasted of 35 minutes of talk time. This handset kicked off the DynaTAC line which was produced from 1983 until 1994. Thankfully, it did get progressively smaller as the time went on.
[Via CNN]