First mobile phone conversation in 75 years: ‘It sounded like the radio’

For example, truck drivers via mobile phone can keep in touch with the main office and journalists as quickly as possible Breaking news Pass it on to their classmates.

That took a lot of space and energy at first, Today’s magazine is written by a technology engineer: The phone system weighed about 40 kilograms and took up most of the luggage space. When the phone rang, it required so much power that the headlights went out.

the cost of it Also a small fortune: $15 subscription costs per month, converted to the current exchange rate of about 175 euros. Plus about 35 cents per call (now over €4). In 1948, there were about 5,000 American users, making about 30,000 calls per week. Only a few users in each city could make phone calls at the same time, and the rest had to wait their turn.

In 1973 it became a mobile right

However, there is still debate about whether you can really see this as the beginning of mobile telephony, says analyst and mobile expert Tim Wijkman of Telecompaper. “It was actually a kind of radio, you already had in army wagons at that time. In principle, it could also be listened to, for everyone who had the equipment for it.” Initially, you could not simultaneously talk on the car phone, you had to talk or listen – just like with a walkie-talkie.

With the true beginning of the mobile phone, Wijkman instead thinks of a spring day in 1973 (April 3, to be exact) when Motorola project chief Marty Cooper made an exciting phone call from a New York sidewalk to major competitors of Bell Labs, who were also developing Consumer cell phones.

Cooper remembers that moment: