Today, 51 years ago, the first cell phone call was made.

On April 3, 1973, just 51 years ago, Martin Cooper stood on a 6th Avenue sidewalk in Manhattan holding a device the size of a brick and performed the first of . “I call you from a mobile phone, from a real cell phone, a mobile phone”, said Cooper, an engineer then in Motorola and “father” of the mobile phone, during his conversation with Joel Engel, head of Bell Labs. Imagine that anyone passing by Cooper that day was living unbeknownst to a historical moment – cell phones would be available to the average consumer in the next decade. In the fifty years that were mediated by that first call, Cooper’s massive device evolved and was replaced by a wide variety of thin and faster phones that are now everywhere. The huge explosion and impact of mobile phones today has not surprised Cooper who said that “the possibility that mobile phones would be considered a day necessary for much of humanity was clear from the beginning.” “I was not surprised that everyone has a mobile phone” told CNN the 94 year old Cooper today. For months before that first call, Motorola was giving a road race to build a mobile phone – Bell Labs’ rival awe, the legendary AT& research arm T who had developed the transistor and other innovations. “It was the largest company in the world, while we were a small company in Chicago”, Cooper recalls. “They just didn’t think we were very important”. The launch of mobile phone In the 1990s the mobile phone took off, as it shrunk a lot in size and became much more user-friendly. Today, according to a study by the 2021 Pew Research Center, 97% of Americans have a mobile phone. In the years mediated by that first call, Cooper wrote a book about the power of the mobile, founded companies, toured giving speeches and now giving interviews to the media. Looking back, Cooper greatly approves of where the phone has led us. iPhone user himself, he likes to use Apple Watch and connect his headphones to his phone. “I am optimistic. I know there are disadvantages on the cell phone. There are people addicted to it. We have people walking down the street talking on their cell phone. Overall, I believe that the mobile phone has changed humanity for the better and this will continue in the future,” he concluded.