Forty years ago, on 3 April, 1973, Martin Cooper made a very important call in history – the first public conversation using a mobile phone. To make the call, he used a prototype Motorola DynaTac that was 25 cms long, weighed 1 kg and had a battery life of 35 minutes. Mobile phones have evolved hence, and they are everywhere in the world now.
Cooper, who was inspired by Captain Kirk’s famous flip-top communicator from the Star Trek TV series, first called up a rival engineer from the pavement of Sixth Avenue to brag about winning the race to make the first portable phone. Naturally, there were people who did not see any future in mobile phones but Cooper and his team were persistent and managed to bring out a $4000 mobile phone model weighing 794g to the market in ten years. Cooper presently helps run Dyna LLC. He also acts as an adviser on telecommunications issues for various companies and the government.
Mobile phone technology has grown phenomenally, especially in the last few years. According to the U.N., the world has 6 billion mobile phone subscribers, and many of them are moving into the smartphone arena. Tech research firm Strategic Analytics claimed that the global smartphone population topped 1 billion last year. Incidentally, Vodafone, which was one of the two sole mobile providers in UK till 1993 (the other being Cellnet), took just less than nine years to reach the one million customers mark and then 18 months to reach the next one million.
Apart from making calls, mobile phones mainly gained popularity for text messages that users could send to each other. Not many know that the first SMS message to a mobile phone was sent in 1992 by engineer Neil Papworth in UK to his friend Richard Jarvis’s Orbitel 901 handset. It read simply “Merry Christmas”, an early message sent on 3 December. The length of messages gradually rose and the current limit of 160 words per message was a result of German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand’s research. He had arrived at the number by typing a series of random questions and thoughts into his typewriter, and then counting the characters involved. He had found 160 to be ‘perfectly sufficient’ for expressing almost any thought or question.
In 2013, the first phone seems like a brick, normal voice calls are giving way to video calls and text messages are being replaced by internet-based messaging apps.
