A mobile phone, also known as a cell phone, is a portable electronic device which is generally used for distant communication between people. Of course, since technology has evolved quite a lot, a cell phone is now used for more than just making and receiving calls. People buy cell phones which allow them to listen to music. Others pay a lot of attention to the integrated camera as they like to have a portable device that will allow them to take pictures. Other people care about the capabilities to surf the internet or to check their e-mails. The important thing is that cell phones can cover a lot of communication possibilities.

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But how much do we really know about the first cell phone? For example, did you know that the first cell phone was absolutely huge and very different from the regular cell phones that we use in our days? The mobile phone became portable on the 20^th of February 1942 when American Donald Mitchell requested the issue of a patent for his mobile phone which he then referred to as a “portable radio for transmission and reception”. This gadget would work by using short radio waves and it has quite a limited area in which it would function. Like I said, the device used to be huge and the first cell phone was as heavy as 2.5 kg. It’s been no less than 35 years until mobile phone became usable by us, the regular people. Martin Cooper is considered to be the inventor of the first cell phone. He was manager at the Motorola Company back then. He was the one that made the first call from a cell phone back in the year 1973. Dyna TAC 8000X was the first commercial mobile phone in the world.



As you know, most people in the entire world own at least one cell phone. The thing is that they come in all shapes and sizes and you can most likely find one which is affordable, even if it doesn’t come with a lot of high end features. Back then, the Dyna TAC which was the first cell phone that became commercially available cost $3500 and you can understand why there were not a lot of people that could afford it. Smart guy this Martin Cooper. But what do you really know about him? Martin Cooper grew up in the city of Chicago and he earned his degree in the field of electrical engineering. He studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He served 4 years in the navy and then we worked at a telecommunication company. In 1954, he was hired by Motorola to work as a project manager for developing portable products. Since he was pretty good at his job, he ended up leading the Motorola cell phone research.



Well, since cell phones are definitely one accessory that we can’t live without, you could say that Martin Cooper invented one of the coolest gadgets in the world. A big round of applause for Martin Cooper!

Martin Cooper, who placed what is believed to have been the first public call from a cell phone, reveals that he’s currently using an Android phone. Guess which one!

Cell phones are part of our everyday life but the sad truth is that we know very little about the real history of cell phones, which was the first man who made a call or which is the first cell phone model.

As most of the major events (good and bad) that took place after July 4, 1776, the mobile phone “was born” in 1973 on the greatest American land, although various concepts, plans and prototypes existed since the early twenty Century. Peak, the first inventor is the Motorola manufacturer, a company which currently is about to abandon the mobile division.

On April 3, 1973, Dr. Martin Cooper (one of the U.S. company managers), was the first earthly person who initiated a call from a mobile phone. At the other end of line was none other than Joel Engel, his big rival from Bell Labs (actually Alcatel – Lucent), another company who was looking for revolutionary technology. That discussion unfortunately had not been recorded, but there are rumors that Engel started to cry with crocodile tears when he heard the news. But he calmed down quickly and with engineers from Bell Labs he started to focus on developing mobile networks.

Since then, they worked hard to achieve all kinds of prototypes but the first cell phone designated for social use appeared only in 1983. This was the Motorola DynaTAC (model 8000x) – an “object” viewed with suspicion by people and with admiration by people passionate about technology. You could talk on this phone for maximum 30 minutes and in stand-by mode, it hardly touched 8 hours.

But not everyone could afford this mobile phone and not everyone was able to keep it in their hand. The Motorola DynaTAC (known as Zack’s phone from “Saved by the Bell”) costs $3995, and had 330 mm in lenght and weighed about 1 kg (869 grams) – like a “brick” in our days. Not to mention that the charge time was about 10 hours, much higher than the autonomy. Even if now these performances are causing hilarious reactions, do not forget that a race to perfection always starts at the bottom.

In the period between 1983 – 1989, five DynaTAC models were launched, but at the end of 1989 they were replaced by a far more engaging and powerful terminal, the MicroTAC Motorola 9800x (TAC = Total Area Coverage). The latter came with a specific loading dock and had a “flip” design with an “elegant” slider that covered the keyboard. With that slider opened, this cell phone reaches 229 mm in length, but the compact design allowed the users to keep the phone in their pockets. However, with 303 grams in weight (that’s if you opt for a slim battery, thin and light) you need to have some resistant pockets.

The MicroTAC, the representative phone of ’80s, was available in seven versions (models) and was sold until 1991 at prices between $ 2495 and $ 3495. Nokia fans and beyond, you’re wondering what the Finnish giant did during the mobile phone pioneering? Well, Nokia has produced commercial communications and military equipment since the early ‘60s, but their first GSM phone (Nokia 1011) was released after nine years of the onset of DynaTAC, in 1992. About Nokia 1011 is known that it has some nice sizes (195 x 60 x 45mm), unlike the Motorola “bricks”. It was functional in a 900 MHz band and the phonebook had a capacity of 99 numbers.

In 1994 it was replaced by Nokia 2100 – first Nokia who came with that famous ringtone Tune and it was the first terminal which offered data transfers, fax and SMS. The Finns hoped to sell at least 400,000 models, but Nokia 2100 has exceeded all expectations reaching the amazing number of 20 million terminals sold worldwide. However, the history of cell phones was discovered that there are a lot of unknown technologies which are waiting to be revealed. Even if the mobile phone has been invented in that early year, today we are looking to reveal new and more amazing technologies.

We’ve been accused (and mostly guilty) of saying a lot of heinous things on The 404, but we refuse to just rest on our laurels and accept these recent allegations of AGEISM. The accusation actually comes at a good time for the show, since the majority of the episodes this week have dealt with censorship, video game ratings, parental responsibility, and childhood development–why not throw ageism into the mix?

We intercepted a Call-From-The-Public from a 50-year-old man who jokingly accused us of being ageist, and we’re not! The fact that Wilson appears to be 48 but is actually only 25 should be enough, right? I guess it doesn’t help that the first story of the day is about Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone, who thinks that modern handsets are just “too complicated.”

Cooper is a former Motorola engineer who’s credited with inventing the handheld cellphone back in 1973. He isn’t too happy about the current state of mobile handsets and actually imagines a future with “a number of specialist devices that focus on one thing that will improve our lives.” Um, Mr. Cooper–we understand that it’s been awhile since you were in the mix, but certain things have come to light…maybe we should start here.

After giving a brief rundown of each of our cell phone histories, we segue into the latest iPhone app to hit the streets, and big surprise, it’s based on the wildly popular Girls Gone Wild series.

The GGW iPhone game is basically just a photo library of the starlets you see on the GGW TV show, but the game is a “test of resistance.” In other words, the app asks you random trivia questions while attempting to distract you with 80 pictures of beautiful women in “warm weather clothing.” Since this is the iPhone App Store, don’t download the game expecting to see nudity, although it has been given a 17+ rating for suggestive themes.

Plenty more stories to get to, including a very awkward voice mail in Calls From the Public, and more details about Tony Hawk’s appearance Monday, November 16. Have a great Wednesday, everyone!

EPISODE 465

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Originally posted at The 404

Along time, society’s life has changed, and progress is a natural tendency of humanity. There are some great people who changed whole world’s lifestyle with their inventions, and just wondering how life would be without their ideas brings strange answers. Nowadays we live at one-click distance from almost everything we need, our lives are part of this informational society, and we are more and more surrounded by gadgets, devices and machines which make our work easier and facilitate entertainment.
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We all have a mobile phone in our pockets but how would we have communicated if Graham Bell wouldn’t have thought of this “”apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically”, which anyway, has changed very much along time. The first transmission (bi-directional) of clear speech was made in 1876, between Bell and Watson, and the words “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” remained in history as the first words transmitted by telephone. In the beginning the Gray transmitter, based on liquid, was used, but it was not practical for the products designed for commercial purposes, so in time the system changed.

The first telephone call was made in 1876, as I said, from Bell’s home in Ontario (Brantford), to his assistant located in Paris, Ontario, at about 10 miles (16 Kms) distance. Bell can be compared in inventions’ history to Henry Ford, because he was not the first one to experiment this kind of transmissions, but he managed to design a commercial version for this “device” and he was a pioneer in introducing his invention into a commercial system and somehow we can say that telephone industry was set up by A.G. Bell.

Getting closer to our days, the concept of cellular phones appeared in 1947 and it is strongly linked to car mobile phones’ functioning system. The inventor of the first modern portable handset is Martin Cooper, a former manager of Motorola, which made the first call on such a portable phone in 1973. He made the call to Bell Labs head of research, who was in the same time his rival, because they were working on research for the same device. Motorola incorporated this technology into a portable device, which had been designed for car use. In 1977, Bell Labs, the rivals, constructed the prototype for this cellular system, and one year later, they offered the device to 2000 trial customers. In Tokyo, 1979, the first telephone system operated and in 1981 Motorola and American Radio started a telephone test system, in U.S.A., but in Washington and Baltimore area. The first American analog cellular service was made available in 1983 by Ameritech. By 1987, cellular telephone industry reached one million subscribers, and the airways became more and more crowded with radio transmissions.

So, since 1947, when the first concept of mobile phone appeared, and until 1987 when there was already a market created with a substantial number of subscribers, have passed 40 years. This means that inventions take time to integrate into people’s life and to really become something usual for them. And since 1987, the standards for transmissions developed continuously and today we have reached the wireless networks level, which offers us the possibility to be connected permanently to a carrier network, and also the phones have been developed so much that they differ a lot from the initial telephone concept. Of course, they still have the same main purpose: voice calls, but plenty of features have been added.

I think that electricity is another important invention which changed a lot humans’ lifestyle and made a lot of things easier. Think about not having electricity for a day…no, it’s enough not to have electricity and we are wasted. A lot of appliances work based on electricity, and the era of mechanical force has gone. Electricity is the engine both for our work and entertainment. Electricity is one of the basic elements in nature, and currently it is the most widely used form of energy. The electricity is the secondary energy source, converted from other sources, like coal, gas, oil, and other primary sources. Before the point electricity was introduced in common life, 100 years ago, people lit their houses with kerosene lamps, and they did not use refrigerators to conserve foods…they cooled food in iceboxes. The rooms were warmed by burning wood or by using stoves with burning coal. Light bulb’s invention brought electricity in people’s houses, and since then, electricity has been used in a very large variety of industries, and it is the main engine who runs our lives right now. It is interesting how to think about how life would have been if we didn’t have any resources to power our laptops and be connected every second, like we are now.

The first digital computer was invented by Shannon, in 1940, and represented the start point for all the programmable devices which surround us today. The first operational computer was created by Zuse in 1941, and its name was Z3, but only in 1977 the personal computer entered the market with a commercial purpose. It was a entertaining tool, and it also helped financial calculations, but it also boosted creative work efficiency. We use it now for social networking, watching high definition movies, listening to music, finding recipes for our favorite foods, and sometimes, we use it for working. The history in this domain was written by companies and people like: Apple, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and many others who had smaller or bigger contributions for this industry’s development. Internet and all the industries Internet-related have also changed so much our lifestyle, that I am watching and studying how common gestures and activities like clicking, browsing, blogging, e-commerce have become and their fast evolution is happening in front of our eyes.

There are much more inventions which changed humanity and which I didn’t mention here, but we wouldn’t like to forget about Flemmings, who discovered penicillin, the invention of micro wave oven, which we should thank Percy LeBaron Spencer for, and many cool inventions!

We pointed out why gadgets were more expensive 30 years ago, but it is also important to note that many of these gadgets were hilariously huge. I’ve collected eight examples, I’ll leave it up to you to add the rest.

In other words, feel free to use our new comments system to add photos of any oversized retro gadgets you have access to.

In the ’70s and early ’80s, it was trendy to offset tiny, crappy screens with enormous and ornate wooden consoles. My family had one of these when I was a kid—looking back on it, I understand why my father chose to put it on the lowest level of our house. It would have seriously compromised the structural integrity of any floor it was sitting on. [TV History]
This is what passed for a widescreen television in 1978. However, the GE Widescreen 1000 really wasn’t widescreen at all. In reality this absurdly huge cabinet housed a small CRT screen that used “a vertical deflection reversing switch to invert and laterally reverse the image, and a three element lens within a light-proof projection chamber to re-invert, magnify and project the image onto a forward projection type reflective screen.” In other words, the image was artificially enlarged through projection. Oh, and that beastly monstrosity sitting next to it is an early VHS recorder. Back in the day, video players like this one could weigh 30 pounds or more. [Flickr and RetroThing]
Surely you are familiar with the DynaTAC 8000X—the first commercially available mobile phone. Seriously, is Dr Martin Cooper making a call to his wife or calling in an air strike? [Puremobile]
The Walkman portable cassette player made its debut in 1979, but if you wanted a more feature rich portable player, you risked a dislocated shoulder picking up one of these ghetto blasters. ['80s Rewind]
Today we have camcorders built into our tiny cellphones. In the ’70s and early ’80s you had to deal with beasts like the Sony SL-F1 Betamax camera. Before the advent of the Betamovie BMC-100P personal camcorder in 1983, the camera and the portable recorder were not integrated into a single unit. [Wikipedia]
The JVC HR-4100 was the first ever “portable” VHS recorder, but this woman appears to be in over her head. This is definitely a “team lift” situation. [Rewind Museum]
We bitch about gas guzzling SUV’s now, but get a load of this ’73 Thunderbird. Seriously, there is enough metal between the cabin and the grill to take on a locomotive. [Corral.net]
Microwaves in the ’70s were big enough to crawl into. According to the owner, this particular model weighed around 80 pounds. [Forty Two]
Bonus: Glasses are not really a gadget, but honestly, what the hell was going on in the ’70s? I have to admit though, Wonder Woman still looks great with those telescopes attached to her face. Anyway, thank God for contacts and Lasik. [Blurbomat]