Cooper succeeded in making the first call using a cell phone in history on April 3, 1973, when he was working for Motorola, which invested millions of dollars to gain access to this technology before its competitors.
American Martin Cooper, the inventor of mobile phones, said that users are looking at their phones so much that many people are obsessed with them.
“I feel shocked when I see someone crossing the street and looking at their cell phone. They have lost their minds,” Cooper told AFP. “They will understand after some people are run over by cars.”
Cooper himself uses Apple’s latest iPhone models and wears an Apple Watch and headphones.
But he conceded that having millions of mobile apps could be too much. “I will never understand how to use a cell phone the way my grandchildren and great-grandchildren do,” Cooper said.
Cooper succeeded in making the first call using a cell phone in history on April 3, 1973, when he was working for Motorola, which invested millions of dollars to gain access to this technology before its competitors.
Motorola was able at that time to overcome the “Bell System” company, which dominated communications for a full century before that in the United States of America.
Bell System was the first to introduce the idea of mobile phones after the end of World War II, and it was able to install phones in cars at the end of the sixties of the last century, due to the dependence of their operation on large batteries.
In the early 1970s, Cooper assembled a team of experts in semiconductors, transistors, filters, and antennas that worked around the clock for three months until they came up with the first cell phone.
The phone weighed one kilogram and contained a battery that could work for a maximum of about 25 minutes.
Cooper celebrated his new invention by making his first call to his rival, Joel Engel, director of Bell System.
“I said, ‘Joel, this is Martin Cooper…I’m talking to you from a handheld phone. But a real, personal, portable, handheld cell phone,'” Cooper said of that call. “There was silence on the other end of the line. I think It was the sound of his teeth gnashing.”
The price of the first commercial version of Motorola mobile phones was $5,000.
