Who invented the mobile telephone?
Meet the man who invented the mobile It was April 3, 1973. Richard Nixon was in power, Elton John was top of the pop charts and a bloke by the name of Martin Cooper was about to make a phone call that would change the world. Cooper worked for what was then a little-known company called Motorola and he had just developed the world’s first “hand-held cellular telephone”. “It was huge,” recalls Cooper, who was in Sydney this week to address a communications conference. “The phone weighed almost two kilos – it was about the size of a brick.” If that sounds prehistoric, so too was the phone’s power efficiency. “The battery lasted somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes. But that didn’t matter very much because you could only hold it up to your ear for 10 minutes before your arm got tired,” he says. Cooper knew the first call he ever made on that state-of-the-art phone would be a moment of history.
