On a street near the Manhattan Hilton in New York City, Motorola’s Martin Cooper made the first call with an experimental cellular phone, to Bell (then part of AT&T), the rival company in the mobile phone race. Cooper called Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Labs. It took Motorola another 10 years to overcome the technological and regulatory hurdles of cellular phone use. Commercial service began in 1983, with a DynaTAC (pictured). The first users paid $3,500 for the phone ($7,400 today). It wouldn’t be until 1990 that cellular service reached 1 million subscribers in the United States. Thirty years later, the number of cellular phone users would surpass 7 billion.
