What happened in 1973, and what did not happen in 1967
Mobile phones did not exist in 1967. The first call from a handheld cellular phone was made on 3 April 1973 in New York by Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, using a prototype of what became the DynaTAC. By Cooper’s own account, which has been widely repeated, he called a rival researcher at Bell Labs to say he was speaking from a handheld cellular phone. Phones that could be carried in a pocket and used on a public network were commercially available only in 1983, and cellular networks themselves began running in the late 1970s.
What did exist in 1967 was the car radiotelephone. It was a real service, but a very different one.
The car radiotelephone
Bell System, the American telephone monopoly, began a Mobile Telephone Service in 1946, starting in St. Louis and spreading to other cities. It used a radio transmitter in the car, a base station in the city and an operator to connect each call to the ordinary telephone network. The equipment was heavy, often filling much of the boot (trunk) of a car, with a handset in the passenger compartment.
The basic limitation was capacity. Each city was given only a small number of radio channels, and each call occupied one for its whole length. Only a limited number of subscribers could be served, and the service was costly. Waiting lists were common. Users often had to wait for a free channel and could hear other people’s calls on the same channel.
In 1964 the Bell System introduced an improved version, the Improved Mobile Telephone Service. It allowed direct dialling without an operator and used channels more efficiently. In 1967 this was the state of the art in the United States. It was a service for a few business people, officials and emergency users, not for the general public. Other countries ran their own, mostly small, mobile radio systems, and details varied.
Why cellular was different
The crucial problem was the shortage of radio frequencies. Engineers at Bell Laboratories worked out in the late 1940s that the answer was a “cellular” design: divide a region into small areas, each with its own low-power base station, and reuse the same frequencies in areas that are far enough apart not to interfere. As a caller moved between cells, the call would be handed over to the next station.
The idea was sound on paper, but it needed fast switching and computing to track and hand over thousands of calls. That was beyond the technology available at the time. The cheap, small components that later made it possible, such as integrated circuit chips and then the microprocessor, were still being developed. The first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appeared only in 1971, two years before Cooper’s call.
From 1973 to the first networks
Motorola’s team, led by Cooper, built the first handheld prototype in a matter of months in 1972 and 1973. It was large by later standards, weighing a little over a kilogram, and its battery gave only a short talk time. Cooper has said that the original Star Trek television series, which was first broadcast in 1966, partly inspired him, with its hand-held communicators, though such accounts are best treated as personal recollection.
A working system took far longer than a prototype:
- 1979: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone launched a commercial cellular system in Tokyo.
- 1981: Nordic countries introduced a shared network.
- 1983: A commercial cellular service started in Chicago, and Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X went on sale at a price of close to four thousand dollars.
So the gap between the 1973 call and a product that ordinary customers could buy was about ten years.
Portable radios in the meantime
Handheld radios did exist before 1973, but they were not telephones. During the Second World War, American forces used portable radios such as the “walkie-talkie” backpack set and the smaller “handie-talkie”. The portable radios carried by soldiers in Vietnam in 1967 were two-way military radios on dedicated channels. They could not call an ordinary telephone, and they did not connect to a public network. Pagers, used by some professionals such as doctors, could signal a person but could not carry a conversation.
Where this leaves 1967
The title of this article places the first mobile phone in 1967, which is not correct. A fair summary is that 1967 was well within the car-phone era: mobile telephony was real but rare, expensive and tied to vehicles. The pocket phone came later, and the idea was one that relied on developments in electronics that were only just starting in the late 1960s.