Landline telephone transmission was certainly a breakthrough in communications in the United States, allowing news and information to travel coast to coast in seconds. Its only disadvantage was the lack of portability. Wireless telephone signal transmissions were possible as early as  the 1940s, but were extremely limited, bulky, and expensive to implement. The best technology had to offer in the early 1940s was employed by the military; the Motorola SCR-300 needed a designated person just to operate it. This mobile telephone looked more like a backpack, weighing 38 pounds, with a three-mile range, and a standby battery life of 8-12 hours. Obviously, the commercial version of wireless telephones would have to slim down a bit.

On this day, April 3, in 1973, Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola gave the first public demonstration of a prototype cellular phone. Standing outside near the New York Hilton Hotel in Manhattan, he dialed a number and connected to Bell Labs in New Jersey, the same place that witnessed the first landline telephone call.

Motorola was already a leader in the development of car phones, which utilized the vehicle’s antenna for transmission, but the company envisioned the coming of a phone age that was truly mobile. Well over a million dollars went into research and development of the first commercial telephone, the DynaTAC (that’s Dynamic Total Area Coverage) 8000x. Cooper recalled it weighed 2 lbs. and had a talk time of 25 minutes. Not that anyone could hold it up for that long, he said.