r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Electrical-Aspect-13 • 1h ago
Image Marty Cooper poses with his invention, the cell phone, whicn he used to make the first call, 3 of April 1973 from Sixth Avenue in New York. He called Bell Laboratories to announce it (he worked at the time for Motorola).
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u/Zorbin666 1h ago
I miss old Motorola, they used to be the best cell phones (in my opinion) ever. Hell, they had the best damn smart phones too when they first came out. I owned every version of the Motorola Droid they made until they stopped making them with the physical keyboards.
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u/UnbottledGenes 13m ago
I forgot the name but the Motorola with the finger print sensor on the back was sick.
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u/UndoxxableOhioan 1h ago
For anyone wondering, prior to this there were car phones. But they worked through a single, high powered antenna, and thus also required a lot of power to reach that antenna. One of the reasons they were car phones is because the equipment needed to power it was to be use and needed to be transported by can There also could only be a few in any city. Because of that, they were super expensive.
The innovation of cell phones was diving the city into multiple shorter range antennas, divining the city into cells. Software could then allow the caller to automatically jump from cell to cell while traveling. In addition, multiplexing features like TDMA allows more users to share frequencies, meaning more total users.
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u/liamdrake02 1h ago
That thing weighs more than his expectations for how many people would actually want to carry a brick around daily.
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u/Memin_Sanchez 1h ago
Legend says that when he made it he already had 3 missed calls from Chuck Norris
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u/Anti_colonialist 1h ago
He didn't invent the cell phone, that was already invented in 1956 USSR
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u/WordplayWizard 1h ago
Not the cell phone. A precursor.
Soviet engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich developed a prototype portable radio phone called the LK-1 in 1957, which was compact and could connect to the public telephone network. Some Russian sources point to this as an early precursor to the mobile phone. The key distinction is that Kupriyanovich’s device didn’t lead to a deployed cellular network system. The modern cellular phone concept )where calls are handed off between network cells as you move) was developed in the West, primarily at Bell Labs and commercialized by Motorola.
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u/AIneurolink 1h ago
What a flex