The Mobile Phone: 40 Years On

It has been forty years since some clever so and so made sure that we never lose contact or be out of touch with the people we need to speak to.

That clever inventor was Martin Cooper, who brought us the Motorola DynaTac in 1973, when the first ever call on a mobile phone was made. Although this piece of technology was extremely ahead of the times and paved the way for all of our handsets today, it is now considered a ‘brick’.

That is because the original DynaTac was in fact 10 inches in length and weighed around 2.5 pounds. If we compare that to the slim and slender models of mobile phones we have today, which weighs between four and size ounces, we can see how far our handsets have come. It definitely makes a difference to our pockets!

The DynaTac contained 30 circuit boards, boasted a talk time of up to 35 minutes and took about ten hours to charge up fully. The size, weight and limitations of this device are classed as ‘laughable’ by today’s society but we can’t deny that it made history. When the DynaTac was first introduced, there were only a few people that used it. If we compare this again to today, mobile phones are everywhere, with around 6 billion people owning a handset. As technology continues to advance, this figure is only going to increase.

A decade later and games were beginning to be added to the handsets with an influx of Nokia’s introducing the phenomenon which was called ‘Snake’. This game required the player to control the snake around the screen collecting food and if the snake touched the wall, the game was over.

Forty years after the first phone call was made, we have phones with touchscreens, Bluetooth, Internet browsing, cameras and apps with HTC, Blackberry and the iPhone being just some of the main brands of mobile technology. Mobile phones of today also boast hours and hours of talk time, take only an hour or so to charge and definitely do not have 30 circuit boards.

As we sit here and celebrate the forty years of the mobile phone, we ask you … what was your first ever handset?