Today marks the fourtieth anniversary of the first mobile phone conversation in 1973, when Motorola employee Martin Cooper made the first call in New York to its competitor AT&T.
“I’m ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end,” Cooper said, marking the first words spoken over cell phone.
Cooper was awared with the Marconi prize today as part of the anniversary celebrations.
“Motorola was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me,” Cooper told The Marconi Society.
“If you wanted to change society it was the place to be. In 1965 I was given a new assignment to head the Portable Products Group. We had one over-riding belief: that people are inherently mobile.”
The mobile device used was a Motorola DynaTAC of 9 inches tall, containing 30 circuit boards.
A talk time of 35 minutes was possible with a recharge time of ten hours.
The first mobile call in Africa was made 14 years later in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1997, this time by Telecel.
With mobile use growing actively on the continent, Africa is not short of technological innovations as its nation-advancing success stories such as M-Pesa testify.
HumanIPO reported last year on the twentieth anniversary of the first SMS sent on an Orbitel 901 handset, saying: “Merry Christmas”.
