Mondo Knows Facts

The first mobile phone call was placed in New York City in 1973

Motorola engineer Martin Cooper called his rival at Bell Labs using a portable prototype phone

On 3 April 1973, Martin Cooper made the first cellular phone call on a street in Manhattan using a Motorola DynaTAC prototype. The device weighed over one kilogramme and offered a maximum talk time of thirty minutes after ten hours of charging. Cooper called Joel Engel, the head of AT&T's competing cellular research team.

Phone call on beach
Peter Drier · CC BY 2.0 · licence · source

Where this comes from

IEEE Spectrum

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Tags: telephones, mobile, motorola

The first mobile phone call was placed in New York City in 1973: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?
Motorola engineer Martin Cooper called his rival at Bell Labs using a portable prototype phone. The figure is taken from IEEE Spectrum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
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