Public got first cell phone demo 30 years ago
Source: CNN.com
It's time to make "Happy Birthday" the ring signal of your cell phone -- Thursday is the 30th anniversary of the first public demonstration of a call from a handheld wireless phone.
Martin Cooper, a researcher at Motorola Inc., made the call from the corner of 56th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan on April 3, 1973.
Bystanders were agape at the spectacle, Cooper recalls.
"We were surprised, because we thought New Yorkers were so blase. We caused a great stir," he says.
The phone was a mammoth by today's standards -- it weighed almost two pounds and was 10 inches long. Talk time was 20 minutes. Still, it was a huge advance over the car-mounted mobile phones that had been in use since the 1940s.
The purpose of the public demonstration was not just to dazzle New Yorkers. Motorola was at the time trying to head off regulatory approval of AT&T's vision of wireless communications, which focused on car phones.
