Right : The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X , the first cell phone ever made commercially available ( 1984 model ) . Left : Martin Cooper , the lead discoverer of the DynaTAC and the male parent of the cellphone phone , in a 2007 reenactment of the very first cell headphone call ever made on a DynaTAC prototype in 1973 . Image Sources : Wikimedia Commons

On April 3 , 1973 , Motorola employee Martin Cooper made a very consequential sound call . dial up AT&T ’s Joel Engel from midtown Manhattan , Cooper inform Engel that Motorola had beaten AT&T to the punch on a unexampled project they ’d both been trying to develop : The world ’s very first cadre earpiece . Cooper ’s call came not from an office edifice , but , for the first time ever , from the street .

His prototype in hand , Cooper stood on the bustling pavement and spokethe first actor’s line ever uttered into a jail cell phone : “ Joel , this is Marty . I ’m calling you from a cell phone , a actual , handheld , portable jail cell phone . ”

First Cell Phone Cooper

Right: The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the first cell phone ever made commercially available (1984 model). Left: Martin Cooper, the lead inventor of the DynaTAC and the father of the cell phone, in a 2007 reenactment of the very first cell phone call ever made on a DynaTAC prototype in 1973. Image Sources:Wikimedia Commons

With those words , the revolution had arrive .

As is the casewith all momentous inventions , the gyration had actually been afoot for decades . All the way back in 1947 , AT&T ’s Bell Labs had turned out the first inquiry on cellular communication theory internet . After that , the subspecies was on .

While the far large AT&T led the airstream throughout the fifties and sixties , the relative upstarts at Motorola begin to end the gap . And as AT&T devoted itself largely to the crucial labor of explicate the first cellular web , Motorola was capable to leapfrog the rivalry and , in 1973 , finish developing the first cell phone for such a web .

That phone , the DynaTAC 8000X , finally came to market in 1984 . At that point , it weighed nearly two Lebanese pound ( 790 Hans C. J. Gram ) and measured 10 inches in distance — and that ’s not even counting its thick rubber eraser antenna — making it over six times heavier and two times longer than the iPhone 6 .

Beyond that , the DynaTAC had a fundamental red light-emitting diode display for numbers , 60 transactions of assault and battery life ( followed by a ten - hour thrill time ) , and retailed for $ 3,995 — which would compare to a slight over $ 9,000 today .

The next great leaps in the cadre phone ’s story remain to be determine , but it just might be the much - rumored flexible cellphone screen .

Several companies are working on this feature , with the most recent major wave made byReFlex , in February . The companionship order its gadget will be on the market in the next five old age , but for now , we ’ll have to make do with their — admittedly astonishing — prototype demo TV :