50 years ago he made the first cell phone call CNN Business

New York CNN — On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper stood on a sidewalk on sixth avenue in Manhattan with a device the size of a brick and made the first public call from a cell phone to one of the men he’d been competing with to develop the device. “I’m calling you on a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a personal, handheld, portable cell phone,” Cooper, then an engineer at Motorola, said on the phone to Joel Engel, head of AT&T-owned Bell Labs. While cell phones would not be available to the average consumer for another decade,…