He had the idea for this first model of cell phone while watching an episode of “Star Trek”, where Captain Kirk used his famous “communicator”.
The mobile he used on April 3, 1973, in front of journalists and passers-by on a Manhattan street, was a kind of brick weighing more than 1 kilo. It took 10 hours to charge the battery for 35 minutes of conversation! Who did Cooper call? His colleague Joel Engel, working for the competing company Bell Labs! Bell Labs had launched a car phone in 1946, but Cooper’s team at Motorola was the first to create a mobile linked to a cellular antenna.
What was the content of this first call? Quite proud of having overtaken his rival, Cooper would have said to him, roughly ” Joel, I’m calling you from a real…
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