Happy 40th Birthday To World's Most Annoying Thing: The Mobile Phone

Mobile phones didn’t really take off until the late 1990s, but the first of the things made a telephone call on this day in 1973. According to historical sources, Motorola DynaTAC inventor Martin Cooper placed that first mobile call to a rival inventor at Bell Labs. While the conversational details are lost to history, the first guy probably said something like “I’m kind of breaking up here, did you say ‘seven,’ seven p.m.?” And then the next guy likely said something along the lines of, “Gah, crap, I can’t hear you at all. Just text me and I’ll put it on my calendar. You still there? Hello? Hellooooo?”

One or both inventors then probably muttered something vile, and went on with their day.

Cooper was inspired by Captain Kirk’s communicator on the original “Star Trek” show. And he says the first batch of prototypes included a lot of things we’d recognize as an “old phone” even today: flip phones, clamshells, etc. But he went with the big “brick” style phone because it was the simplest model. Cooper is still inventing stuff in Silicon Valley. Stay in school, kids! And quit playing with your phone during class.

Photo by DeiMosz