Technology & Medicine › Digital age › Microprocessor (Intel 4004)
Mobile phone
April 3, 1973 (Cooper's call); networks from 1979· Invention or discovery· Communication & computing
Well documentedSolid records, physical evidence or scientific consensus.
A portable telephone that connects by radio to a network of local towers, letting calls follow the user.
See it on the Technology & Medicine map →How it works
Bell Labs engineers proposed 'cellular' networks in 1947: divide an area into small cells, each with a low-power tower, reuse the same radio channels in cells that are not neighbours, and hand calls from tower to tower as users move. On April 3, 1973, Motorola's Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellular call on a 1.1 kg prototype. NTT opened the first cellular network in Tokyo in 1979; Motorola's DynaTAC went on sale in the US in 1983 for $3,995.
Why it mattered
Phones became attached to people, not places. Mobile subscriptions now outnumber people, and many poorer countries skipped landlines, using phones for banking and business.
How we know
Bell Labs memos, Motorola records and the surviving prototype, FCC filings, and International Telecommunication Union statistics showing subscriptions passed eight billion in the early 2020s.
Still unknown or debated
What counts as first is debated: car-mounted radio telephones served St. Louis from 1946, and Soviet engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich demonstrated portable radio phones around 1957–58.
Connections (3)
▸Telephone went wireless as the Mobile phoneWell documented
The connection
Bell's telephone turned the voice into an electrical current sent down a wire. A mobile phone sends the same voice signal by radio to a nearby tower, which passes it into the ordinary phone network. Cooper's first 1973 call went to a desk phone at Bell Labs, Motorola's chief rival.
When and how
Bell in Boston, 1876; Martin Cooper of Motorola on Sixth Avenue in New York, April 3, 1973; first commercial cellular network in Tokyo, 1979.
How we know
Mobile phones were built to plug into the existing telephone network and share its numbering system; Motorola and AT&T records document the work.
Debates and open questions
Why US cellular service took until 1983 is debated: slow FCC decisions on radio channels, AT&T's phone monopoly and costly handsets are all blamed.
▸Microprocessor (Intel 4004) powered the Mobile phoneWell documented
The connection
A cellular phone must constantly report to towers, switch towers mid-call and turn voice into digital code. Early handsets needed many boards of chips; processors and specialised chips shrank all this to pocket size. From the 1990s, power-saving processor designs from Britain's ARM let phones run for days on a charge.
When and how
Motorola's labs in the 1970s and 1980s; ARM designs, first created at Acorn in Cambridge, England, in 1985, adopted by Nokia and other phone makers in the 1990s.
How we know
Handset teardowns and chip-industry data show processors at the heart of every phone; ARM reports its designs in almost all smartphones.
Debates and open questions
Little is disputed; an open engineering question is how phones will keep gaining speed and battery life as transistor shrinking slows.
▸Mobile phone evolved into the SmartphoneWell documented
The connection
Cell phones began as brick-sized radios for calls only. Through the 1990s they shrank and added text messages, and by the early 2000s cameras, email and basic web access, on models from Nokia, BlackBerry and Palm. With faster 3G networks, the smartphone turned the phone into a general-purpose pocket computer that also makes calls.
When and how
Martin Cooper's Motorola call, New York, 1973; Japan's first cellular network, 1979; Nokia in Finland and BlackBerry's maker in Canada, then Apple and Google, 2007–08.
How we know
Device histories and sales data show a continuous line; smartphones overtook basic phones in global sales around 2013.
Debates and open questions
Which device was the first true smartphone depends on definition: IBM Simon (1994), Nokia Communicator (1996), BlackBerry or iPhone.