How a genius put the world in our pocket: the rise of the mobile phone

IT may have passed you by – perhaps you were too busy on your smartphone – but it was 50 years ago last week that the first public phone call was made on a mobile device. On April 3, 1973, Marty Cooper, then vice-president and director of systems operations at Motorola, was standing on a corner of Sixth Avenue in New York as passersby ebbed and flowed around him.

“I was demonstrating this cell phone. I took out my phone book – that gives you an idea what primitive times these were – and I called my counterpart [at AT&T-owned Bell Laboratories, a fellow named Joel Engel. I dialled his number and amazingly he answered,” Cooper said in a BBC TV interview last week. “And I said ‘Joel, I’m calling you on a cell phone, but a real cell phone – a personal, handheld, portable cell phone’. There was silence on the other end of the line. I think he was gritting his teeth.”

Motorola had been engaged with Bell Labs to build a cell phone. Bell was focusing its attentions on car phones but Motorola and Cooper were in search of something more ambitious. “We had been trapped in our homes and offices by this copper wire for over 100 years,” said Cooper, now 94.

“And now they were going to trap us in our cars and we at Motorola just didn’t believe that that was the way to go.”

Perhaps it’s understandable why, in Cooper’s telling, Engel wasn’t as thrilled by the significance of that phone conversation as his caller was. “You could tell I was not averse to rubbing his nose in this thing. He was polite to me,” Cooper told CNN. “To this day, Joel does not remember that phone call, and I guess I don’t blame him.”

“Motorola Introduces Wire-Less Telephone”, reported the New York Times on April 4 that year.

The story began: “Motorola Inc demonstrated here yesterday the answer to phone addicts’ prayers – a hand-held, wire-less portable telephone weighing 28 ounces that can connect with any telephone anywhere.

“Called the Dyna T-A-C, the new phone operates on FM radio frequencies at the top end of the spectrum … that the Federal Communications Commission has set aside for the land mobile communications field, including police, fire, taxi and car telephones.

“Basically, Dyna T-A-C looks like a modernised version of a military handie-talkie set.”

That prototype phone was, to use a phrase that would later come into fashion, the size of a house brick. Interestingly, however, Motorola was already looking at making such phones smaller. Cooper said that through use of advanced circuitry and new technologies, the size of the handsets could be reduced even further to the point where they might fit in a breast pocket.

Clear breakthrough

In the demonstration, reporters placed calls from the New York Hilton Hotel to their offices and to acquaintances out of town. The reception was clear, by and large, though the wife of one reporter told him: “Your voice sounds a little tinny … There’s no resonance. I knew you weren’t calling from a regular phone.”

Cooper made the first call to a telephone in the hotel room, but dialled the wrong number and, after an embarrassed pause, said: “Our new phone can’t eliminate that, computer or not.”

No-one back then could have foreseen how staggeringly popular, and sophisticated, mobile phones would come. The vast majority of Americans

– 97% – own a cell phone of some kind, according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2021. In the UK last year, the “smartphone penetration rate” was put at 93%.

Worldwide, analysis by Statista.com suggests that the number of smartphone mobile network subscriptions reached nearly 6.6 billion last year, and is forecast to exceed 7.8 billion by 2028. China, India and the US, it added, are the countries with the highest number of such subscriptions.

People of all ages have smartphones, too. A Childwise study in Britain 2020 found that most children own a mobile phone by the age of seven. A news report added: “The devices have become a fundamental part of life for most young people, it indicates. Many admit that they are fearful of being without their phone and more than half sleep with it by their bed. Overall, children spend about three hours and 20 minutes each day messaging, playing games and being online, the report by Childwise found, down slightly on last year.”

The relentless ubiquity of smartphone use tells its own story. It’s rare to walk down a street, enter a train or a bus, or a coffee shop or an office, and not find at least one person engrossed in his or her smartphone. The smartphone, the Economist magazine said as long ago as 2015, is ubiquitous, addictive and transformative. It had become the fastest-selling gadget in history, outstripping the growth of the simple mobile phones that had preceded them.

Clunky but funky

THOSE early, clunky handsets are endearing to look at in the light of the sleek, all-powerful smartphones that swept them away. The Ericsson GA626, for example: announced in May 1997, it could make and receive calls and send and receive SMS text messages, and its address book could store up to 99 numbers.

It was also, says the Mobile Phone Museum, the first phone to offer four interchangeable colour panels.

The iPhone, launched in 2007, changed all that. It’s amusing to look at the video of Apple’s Steve Jobs, teasing an audience by revealing three new products – a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a “revolutionary” mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device – and then, the killer touch, disclosing that all three were in fact contained within just one product: the iPhone. “Today,” he went on, “Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”

Smartphones at that time, he said, usually combined a phone, email capability and internet access. The problem was that “they’re not so smart and they’re not so easy to use – what we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use”.

Even so, some critics were more than sceptical about the iPhone. “When the iPhone came out, people said, ‘This isn’t going to work. It doesn’t have a physical keyboard. Everybody wants a physical keyboard’,” Apple CEO Tim Cook says in a new interview with GQ magazine this week. But the sceptics were confounded: the iPhone genuinely changed modern society.

As the leading media website CNET put it a year or so ago, Apple, since 2007, has sold more than 1.2 billion iPhones and has become the world’s most profitable public company.

“Copycat phones from companies like Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Xiaomi proliferated across the globe, and now even people in places without steady electricity have smartphones,” CNET added.

It quoted a US research analyst, Ross Rubin, who said: “It’s difficult to understate [the iPhone’s] impact. The ripples it has created affect wide swathes of our lives.”

Smartphones have grown steadily more sophisticated and far-reaching with each passing year. They have become extensions of ourselves. Writing in the Daily Mail this week, author Libby Purves acknowledged that the internet-capable smartphone has won the battle for our hearts, minds and ever-decreasing attention span. Even children, she wrote, “can wander about carrying not only the wherewithal to phone home but a diary, radio, camera, photo album, music player, mail, international dictionary, global news, maps, encyclopaedia, NHS record, tickets, fitness tracker and dating opportunity”.

On a recent trip to Croatia, her phone — after serving as a theatre ticket and lunch money — was satnav, hotel booking, parking, plane ticket, bus timetable and ticket, “plus a map showing which of the Roman ruins was the famous ‘Pillar of Shame’ to which they chained criminals. There were moments when the phone dependence felt a bit like being chained to a pillar, though a very small, neat, pretty one”.

Purves adds that in a hostile or baffling world, one’s phone is personal, a haven of privilege and privacy that links you to the people you care about. But it also knows all about you, which can be an issue in some circumstances. Smartphones are both boon and tyranny. The experience of those who do not have smartphones is, she adds, ever more difficult.

An unexpected issue has cropped up in, of all places, Ukraine. The New York Times reported in January that, early in the invasion of Ukraine, some Russian soldiers who were closing in on Kiev betrayed their location to Ukrainian eavesdroppers by making calls on their cell phones – and uploading videos to TikTok. The Ukrainians responded with devastating missile strikes. Not that this seemed to deter Russian soldiers. As the NYT revealed: “Now, almost a year later and despite a ban on personal cell phones, Russian soldiers in the war zone are still using them to call wives, girlfriends, parents and each other, and still exposing themselves to Ukrainian attacks.”

Screen time whine

WIDESPREAD concern has been voiced about our addiction to our smartphones. Digital detoxes, in which we take breaks from our screens, social media and video conferences for various lengths of time, are popular, but it is something that is becoming more and more of a challenge the more the devices are intertwined with our everyday habits and lives.

As Sophia Epstein put it on a BBC Worklife article just last month, our lives are impossible to detangle from technology: “We pay with our phones at stores, work on our computers and tablets and maintain relationships through apps. And since the pandemic, our life-tech connection has intensified even further. Short of running to the remote wilderness for a few phone-free days, experts say a digital detox isn’t feasible anymore for most people.

Epstein spoke to a Seattle-based consultant, Emily Cherkin, who specialises in screen-time man-agement. “Technology is very much a part of us now,” Cherkin told her. “We bank with an app, read restaurant menus on phones and even sweat with exercise instructors through a screen. It’s so embedded in our lives, we’re setting ourselves up for failure if we say we’re going to go phone-free for a week.”

Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, which points to the “12-step fellowship”, says many of its members have problems with smartphone addiction, and it has devised a helpful series of questions to help others decide whether they have the same problem. One is: “Do you go to sleep with your phone next to you like a partner?”

A Brooklyn teenager named Logan Lane has spoken of her decision to put her phone away and come off social media, and how she formed a Luddite Club for young people who were similarly inclined. “I think the unplugging and the getting offline is 100% something bigger and something that hopefully this generation will take on, particularly as we become parents,” she said on a podcast. “I know I have some regrets about how early I got my phone and how early this addiction was instilled in me. And I can hope that my generation as parents will be able to better manage our kids and give them technology at appropriate ages, unlike the super-young ages that I and my peers have gotten them.”

Apple’s Tim Cook is certainly alert to addiction issues. In his interview with GQ magazine’s Zach Baron, the journalist raises what he describes as the “prosaic but common concern that my iPhone might be gently breaking my brain”. “We try to get people tools in order to help them put the phone down,” responds Cook. “Because my philosophy is, if you’re looking at the phone more than you’re looking in somebody’s eyes, you’re doing the wrong thing. So we do things like Screen Time. I don’t know about you, but I pretty religiously look at my report.”

Digital natives

WHEN Baron talked about his young child being phone-obsessed, Cook said: “Kids are born digital, they’re digital kids now. And it is, I think, really important to set some hard rails around it. We make technology to empower people to be able to do things they couldn’t do, to create things they couldn’t create, to learn things they couldn’t learn. And, I mean, that’s really what drives us. We don’t want people using our phones too much. We’re not incentivised for that. We don’t want that. We provide tools so people don’t do that.”

What of the future? What will smartphones look like in the years to come? Marty Cooper thinks that the phone still has some way to go. “The first 50 years were only the warm-up,” he has said. He believes that future phone technology will be integrated into skin. “Some predict [smartphones ] will become like remote controls for our lives while others think they could disappear into wearable devices such as glasses or watches,” Carolina Diaz Marsa observed on the Tech Advisor website a year ago. “Screens are also expected to get brighter and fold in different ways; the cameras will be so advanced that they will threaten high-end SLRs, and the digital assistants inside them will be even more intelligent.”

Among the predictions in her article are: that the next smart devices will be able to be charged wirelessly over the air; that 6G modems could offer download speeds 50 times faster than 5G; and that artificial intelligence (AI) will become even more powerful in the next 10 years and will play a very important role in our lives.

“If AI is already a key feature in current smartphones, in areas such as voice assistants, photography, augmented reality or real-time language translation, future devices will be even smarter.”

Future shock

MORE recently – last month, in fact – Wired magazine asked a handful of technologists, builders, designers, analysts and futurists their thoughts on what’s next for the smartphone.

“Some said that sophisticated silicon will help us identify ‘real’ media versus fake or AI-generated facsimiles,” reported Wired. “And a few predicted that actual phone calls will fall by the wayside. Still, almost all of them believe that the smartphone is something we’ll continue to carry with us, both literally and metaphorically. The smartphone market may never see the same meteoric rise that it did in the 2010s, but the all-powerful pocket computer is here to stay.”

For all the staggering leaps in smartphone technology, some, like Marty Cooper, the man who made that landmark phone call half a century ago, seem to be lukewarm. “I think today’s phone is sub-optimal,” he said on Radio 4’s Today programme last week.

“It’s really not a very good phone in many respects. Just think about it,” he added. “You take a piece of plastic or glass that’s flat – and you put it against the curve of your head, you hold your hand in an uncomfortable position. When you want to do these wonderful things that it can do, you have to get an app [first].”