← 1440 Explores
1440 Explores
The Wild Story Behind the First Cell Phone Call
00:29:54
The fight that made phones mobile.
Loading summary
Transcript65 lines
- [00:04]
Soni Kassam
Right now, as you're listening, tens of thousands of cell phone calls are happening across a city like Los Angeles. Voices crisscrossing the sky, bouncing between invisible towers. But go back to 1960 and all of LA could barely handle 24. That's not 24 calls per tower. That's 24 calls, period. On today's episode, the story of how we got from there to here. From a time when radio signals were scarce and wireless calls were a luxury, to a world where everyone is connected all the time. You'll meet the man who built the first mobile phone and his wife, the child switchboard operator who grew up to pioneer prepaid cellular. Together they took on the most powerful telecom monopoly in the world and reshaped how we communicate, not just with each other, but with everything. Their forgotten fight didn't just give us mass produced cell phones, it gave us this connected life. Love it or hate it, I'm Soni Kassam and this is 1440 explores. We're on a mission to uncover the essential knowledge that explains your world. We talk to the experts who know the subject best and today's guides are the father of cell phones, Marty Cooper, and the first lady of wireless, Arlene Harris. Stay with us.
- [01:39]
1440 Narrator
Listen. Learning has never been harder. The Internet is overwhelmed with low quality content, clickbait with little substance, AI generated slop and opinions masquerading as facts. Curious people like you are left sifting through noise instead of finding what matters. Enter 1440 topics. We've curated the highest quality resources from across the Internet. Think data, visualizations, captivating videos, long form journalism and paired them with staff written overviews to make every subject easy to understand and explore. Want to learn about venture capital or how new weight loss drugs work? Do you keep reading about CRISPR but are missing the best 101 on the breakthrough technology? Find all of this and so much more at join1440.com 1440 topics separating what's worth your time from the rest of the Internet.
- [02:45]
Soni Kassam
Okay, here's what a mobile phone was like in Los Angeles in 1960. Back then, mobile didn't mean in your pocket. It meant you were tethered to your car, your signal carried by a bulky antenna and relayed through a single channel if it was free. In making that call, that wasn't automatic. You had to go through an operator. And in South Central la, one of those operators was, let's say, say on the younger side.
- [03:12]
Arlene Harris
So I was actually five years old when I first put my hands on a switchboard. But that was because I was sitting on the lap of an operator that was working in my family's business.
- [03:25]
Soni Kassam
Arlene Harris was born into the business of communication. Her parents ran one of the only independent networks in Los Angeles that could route radio phone calls between drivers and dispatchers. And at the time, the. The people who could afford this were either Hollywood stars or less prominent members of the community.
- [03:43]
Arlene Harris
We had several nefarious types, and they were conducting their businesses over the air on our system.
- [03:51]
Soni Kassam
It wasn't just the routing that was manual. Everything was.
- [03:54]
Arlene Harris
Back then, there was no way to know when a call was over unless you listened to the call. And you would have to wait till someone says, over and out.
- [04:06]
Soni Kassam
So young Arlene listened.
- [04:08]
Arlene Harris
I was listening to this whole culture in Los Angeles and how they operated, who their friends were, what kind of trouble they were in, and so on. So it was a big education for me.
- [04:26]
Marty Cooper
In the entire Los Angeles area with the 7 million people, there were only like 24 conversations that could go on on mobile telephones at the same time.
- [04:39]
Soni Kassam
That's Arlene's husband and the man often called the father of cell phones, Marty Cooper. He's describing a world on the brink of transformation. A world where a single mobile tower served an entire metropolis, where radio signals were precious and tightly rationed. That's the world Marty and Arlene were born into. A world where communication was limited by hardware, by status, by who got access. That system might sound primitive now, but at the time, it was already the product of 100 years of innovation. So before we go forward and follow Marty and Arlene's story, let's rewind even further, just to get a sense of how we got there. Back to 1876, when inventor Alexander Graham Bell picked up a hand built device. He'd slaved over on it. There was a thin diaphragm that would vibrate against a coil of wire. Bell then spoke some words into it, and an electric current carried those words through a copper wire to the other room. To his assistant, Thomas Watson, it was the first phone call. No satellites or screens just yet. Just his voice turned into electricity and then back again. It meant that for the first time, a human voice could outrun a horse or a train or a letter. For decades after that, phones stayed tied to walls. Making a call meant standing by a jack, tethered by a cord. Your voice would move through a network of copper wires and manual switchboards. By the 1940s, few ambitious cities tried to go mobile. The result was ultimately the car phone. A big boxy radio Rig that let drivers talk without stopping, kind of. The system was slow, clunky, and shared a single antenna with a tiny number of lines. If someone else was already talking, you had to wait. More like a walkie talkie or CB radio than a personal phone. It was into that world, a wired world, that a young engineer named Marty Cooper arrived. Marty was from Michigan, and all his life he would have one guiding. Can we make it smaller, faster, lighter? Marty saw the same world Arlene had grown up in. Car radios the size of toasters. Operators listening in on calls. Andy asked a very simple question. What if communication didn't need all this baggage? What if a message could go straight to a person instantly and the receiver itself could fit in your hand?
- [07:23]
Marty Cooper
And so I made the first nationwide radio pagers.
- [07:30]
Soni Kassam
Pagers. Today they seem quaint, but back then they were revolutionary tiny wireless devices that could receive a short text instantly. Well, the short text was really just the phone number of the person that had called, but still, that was a big deal.
- [07:47]
Additional Narrator/Voice Actor
Two tickets at Center Court, call me back at 10 and they're yours right this second. You could have missed the hottest tickets in town with a Motorola pager, you know.
- [07:57]
Soni Kassam
Now, by this point, Motorola Marty had joined the telecom company Motorola. And his team had a breakthrough idea. What if you could carry a tiny radio and assign it a special code? That radio would stay on, always listening for one specific signal. When a caller dialed a number and punched in digits, the system would blast the message to all pagers nearby. But only one would respond. Only one would wake up. That trick, selective calling, quietly cracked open a new era. No more switchboard, no more in person operators, just a direct link to you.
- [08:38]
Arlene Harris
They were the first wireless portable device that would help people, help companies manage their workforce without wires en masse, they were driven by new technology rather than vacuum tubes and so forth. And that was a great contribution of Marty's at Motorola was bringing in digital services that were integrated circuit space and so on.
- [09:08]
Soni Kassam
That little chirp, that pocket sized ping didn't just change how businesses operated, it changed how people felt about being reachable. And Marty, he remembers how it all began.
- [09:20]
Marty Cooper
Guess who my first customer was. It was Arlene's father. All these people that were in the business were worried that this new technology would put them out of business. Our salespeople called me and said, you know, we've got some nervous customers here in Los Angeles, including the Harris family.
- [09:39]
Soni Kassam
Arlene's family had built their lives around the old system with cords and cables, and Arlene sitting on the operator's lap, connecting calls. They weren't hostile to the future, but they had questions. Where did they fit in? What came next?
- [09:54]
Marty Cooper
Salespeople met me at the airport and they drove me to the Quail Lodge in Monterey. We waited till the bar, and there was the Harris family. And I spoke with all of the Harris family. The last person I talked to as we were in this bar was Arlene Harris.
- [10:22]
Soni Kassam
Sparks flew. Marty and Arlene got married. Meanwhile, pagers kept flying off the shelves. They were no longer just a curiosity. They had become a habit. People got used to the idea of being pinged anytime, anywhere. And once that idea stuck, the next request was obvious. Don't just page me. How can I talk back? But there was a problem. As I told you at the top of the show, Arlene and her team were connecting calls by hand. In a city the size of Los Angeles, There were just 24 channels available for all mobile users. That was it. One car phone conversation per channel. If you didn't get on, you waited or gave up. But why, you may be wondering, were there so few lines? That's because back then, the phone system in the US was controlled by one massive corporate overlord.
- [11:22]
Marty Cooper
The Bell System was the monopoly.
- [11:26]
Soni Kassam
The Bell System super switcher.
- [11:30]
Additional Narrator/Voice Actor
It should go a long distance to prevent traffic jams on your long distance calls. The Bell System people using technology to help keep down costs and improve service, keeping your phone system the best in the world.
- [11:46]
Soni Kassam
Between the 1930s and the 1980s, if you made a phone call anywhere in America and in many other countries, chances are it went through AT&T's network. AT& T owned nearly everything. The lines, the towers, the equipment, even the phones you rented from home. Its vast empire was known as the Bell System, named after its founder, Alexander Graham Bell. And at the heart of it all was Bell Labs, AT&T's in house research division, a kind of secret workshop where almost every major telecom breakthrough was born. And in 1969, Bell Labs came up with something pretty radical.
- [12:26]
Marty Cooper
They came up with this idea of dividing a city into little circles and they call it reuse using a radio frequency in one part of the city and use it over again. So they wrote this up in a tactical memo, they put it in the files.
- [12:42]
Soni Kassam
That memo became the blueprint for something they called cellular. It was a simple idea, but a revolutionary one. If you could break a city into small zones and reuse the same frequencies in each one, you could multiply capacity almost infinitely. Imagine taking a giant city and drawing interlocking honeycombs over it. Each little hexagon is a cell with a tower in the middle, listening for signals. When you speak into your phone, your voice is first converted into a digital signal. Ones and zeros. That signal is then broken into tiny packets and beamed to the nearest cell tower. The tower sends those packets into the network, where they might hop through other towers, fiber optic lines, or even undersea cables. Along the way, your packets are reassembled in the right order and converted back into sound on the person's phone at the other end. And the clever part? The same frequency can be reused in another cell a few blocks away. And as you move one walking or driving, your call gets handed off seamlessly from one tower to the next like a baton in a relay race. That handoff is what made true mobility possible. Without it, you're stuck with one antenna, one channel, one conversation at a time. With it, millions could talk at once. But here's the Bell didn't build it out. They had a few test cell tower sites and prototypes here and there, but it was mostly theoretical at that point. Until finally they pulled the memo out of the drawer and announced their plan for a cellular future. But their version of that future, they.
- [14:37]
Marty Cooper
Said, well, we want an exclusive monopoly in order for us to invest in the system.
- [14:43]
Soni Kassam
Bell wanted to control the network, and most importantly, they only wanted to build a few towers. Their plan was to fill the country with car phones, not mobile phones. Car phones had powerful transmitters that could reach towers miles away. But Marty Cooper, he saw something else. He wanted to unshackle phones from cars entirely. Here's Arlene.
- [15:10]
Arlene Harris
If you think about people, people walking around with a portable that's less than a watt of power, their phones aren't going to talk as far. So you have to build cell sites in much denser areas.
- [15:28]
Soni Kassam
More towers meant more investment, more complexity, but also way more possibility.
- [15:35]
Arlene Harris
And Marty's guy said, oh, no, no, we gotta build this so that portables will work.
- [15:42]
Soni Kassam
But Bell wasn't interested in more towers. They were interested in fewer calls on their terms. That was the breaking point.
- [15:53]
Marty Cooper
At that point, we made a decision that we were gonna fight the biggest company in the world.
- [16:11]
1440 Narrator
1440 started in 2017 with a simple to deliver fact driven, impactful news to smart, curious readers. Today, our audience of over 4 million is made up of engaged news consumers who want more than just the headlines. They want to understand the why and the how. Yet finding high quality resources to go deeper beyond this podcast, of course, has never been more difficult. The best work, from videos to long form journalism, is too often Buried beneath countless pages of clickbait and low quality AI generated content. That's why we created 1440 topics. Our staff hand curates only the best content and organizes it into a single place for you to explore.
- [16:54]
Soni Kassam
Explore.
- [16:54]
1440 Narrator
We've done the hard work so you can spend more time learning about alternative investments, hurricanes, ancient Rome, and so much more. Continue learning@join1440.com 1440 topics separating what's worth your time from the rest of the Internet.
- [17:16]
Soni Kassam
Okay. It was the end of 1972, and Marty Cooper had made a decision. Bell Labs had dominated phone innovation for decades. But their vision for mobile was all wrong. And it wasn't even mobile. It involved placing radios in cars and routing everything through centralized switching stations. Basically like what Arlene had been doing as a little girl. To Marty, the future was crystal clear. A phone should go where you go. It should belong to you and not your vehicle or your company. But here's the catch. No one had actually ever built a truly mobile phone. Not one that worked on a public network and didn't require a base station or operator. Walkie talkies existed, but they were short range and limited to direct line of sight. You couldn't call a landline from a walkie talkie. You couldn't call someone across the city, let alone across the country. So in late 1972, Marty assembled a small secret team inside Motorola. They raided the company's lab shelves for the newest transistors and battery cells, built custom circuit boards by hand, and used a local base station connected to the regular telephone network to prove it could all work. They didn't need a nationwide network yet, just one working link. And in just three months, they did it.
- [18:48]
Marty Cooper
I talked to our management. The management gave us support. This was in December of 1972. By March of 1973, three months, we had built the world's first handheld portable cellular phone. I'm going to show you what it looks like.
- [19:12]
Arlene Harris
Can barely hold it up.
- [19:15]
Soni Kassam
Marty shows me a prototype. It was a brick. Two and a half pounds, 20 minutes of battery life. But it worked. And if you were holding it, you were no longer tethered to anything. It was the first time someone could hold the network in their hand and take it with them.
- [19:34]
Marty Cooper
And at that point, I decided we're going to do a demonstration. We were going to show the world what it was like to be able to walk around, to have a phone that you could carry with you and that you could talk to anybody in the world. April 3, 1973. It could talk for about 20 minutes before the battery ran down. But that was not a problem because you couldn't hold this up for 20 minutes, it was so heavy.
- [20:03]
Soni Kassam
Still, it almost didn't happen. The phone had been built from scratch, one component at a time. It was the only working unit in the world.
- [20:11]
Marty Cooper
The night before the demonstration, we were still fixing the phone, trying to get it to work.
- [20:21]
Soni Kassam
And now he was on a sidewalk in Manhattan holding a prototype, praying the soldering would hold. Then came the question, who do you call?
- [20:31]
Marty Cooper
And I decide the guy I should call is my enemy. The guy that's running the car telephone project, old Bell system program. His name is Joel Engle. Reached in my pocket, took out my phone book, gives you an idea what the technology was in those things, printed the phone book and I called Joel. And amazingly enough, he answered.
- [20:59]
Soni Kassam
Joel Angle from Bell Labs, the corporate monopoly that insisted mobile phones had to stay in cars, tightly managed, licensed only by them.
- [21:10]
Marty Cooper
And I said, joel, this is Barry Cooper. He says, oh, hello Barry. It was not the happiest sound that I've heard. I said, joel, I'm calling you on a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a personal handheld mobile phone. Silence on the other end. I suspected he was gritting his teeth.
- [21:37]
Soni Kassam
It was a stunt. But like any great stunt, it sent a message to the press, to investors and, and to the people who controlled the airwaves. For the first time, someone had made a real live handheld call in public. Remember at the time Bell still had a monopoly. They didn't just control the hardware, they controlled the spectrum, the invisible lanes that let voices travel wirelessly. And the gatekeeper to those lanes was the fcc, the Federal Communications Commission, a five member panel in Washington that could decide what companies got to use the airwaves and which didn't. And the FCC wasn't budging. For years it refused to open up those frequencies to anyone but Bell. By the early 1980s, nearly a decade after that first call, the technology was ready, but the permission wasn't. Bell ran small test networks in D.C. and Chicago for example, but they weren't open to the public. So Marty's boss, Motorola chairman Bob Galvin, decided to go over the regulators heads.
- [22:54]
Marty Cooper
And at that point the chairman of our company, Bob Galvin, went to see his friend George H.W. bush and demonstrated this photo to him. The first thing George Bush said was, you know, Iran has got to see.
- [23:09]
Soni Kassam
This, meaning Ronald Reagan, the President. So Bob Galvin of Motorola and George Bush walk over to the Oval Office with his famous mobile phone prototype.
- [23:20]
Marty Cooper
So he walked into the President's office. President called his wife. So talk about a historical call. Please finish the call and said to George H.W. why don't we have this?
- [23:34]
Soni Kassam
Bush explained that the FCC hadn't ruled.
- [23:37]
Marty Cooper
And the president, he said, george, call those people up and tell them to get moving. The people need this. And within a month or two, the FCC had made a decision.
- [23:50]
Soni Kassam
The FCC opened wireless spectrum to competitors for the first time. That decision decision in 1982 broke Bell's exclusive hold on the airwaves, clearing the path for cellular networks and setting the stage for the AT&T breakup. Two years later. Marty remembers those successive victories.
- [24:08]
Marty Cooper
Number one, the system was going to be competitive. There would not be a monopoly. Number two, the people would decide what kind of technology they want. If the Bell says they wanted to make car telephone, let them do it. But if somebody wants to come up with a handheld personal phone, they should also have the ability to do that.
- [24:31]
Soni Kassam
And that's what changed everything. From that ruling came a tidal wave of innovation. Marty and Motorola got to work on the first commercially available handheld, the Dynatec.
- [24:43]
Additional Narrator/Voice Actor
Like this unique cellular portable made by Motorola, which weighs only 30 ounces. Right now, businessmen and women are major users of radio telephones, where cellular is in service. But more people will take advantage of cellular.
- [24:57]
Soni Kassam
In 1983, a year after the FCC opened up the airwaves, and a decade after Marty made that first call to Joel Engel, the phone finally reached the public. It was still the size of a brick. The battery lasted half an hour, and it cost nearly $4,000. But it worked, and more importantly, you could walk around with it. And while Marty and Motorola were focused on building the phones themselves, Arlene was building the tools that would make it possible for everyday people to actually use them. She started a company called Cellular Business Systems, Inc. And in the early 1980s, created a system that could activate mobile service in real time, monitor usage, prevent fraud, and allow users to pay up front. In other words, she invented prepaid cellular. No contract, no credit check, just a phone and a card. Arlene's system quietly opened the door to millions of people who'd otherwise be left out. It was the next big leap. Not in hardware, but in. Today, more than 6.8 billion people own a mobile phone. Nearly nine out of 10 adults on Earth carry one. And these devices, they aren't just phones anymore. They're compasses, studios, bookshelves, banks, boarding passes. They're basically our brains now living in our pockets. And the technology they harness picks up right from the Bell. Memo from 1969. About the Honeycomb cells. The same basic principles are at play. But today, instead of carrying a few thousand phone calls, those towers handle everything. Every text, every phone, every TikTok, every Uber ping, every email, every FaceTime. They're all just packets of data racing through the same cellular web, each one tagged with a destination like microscopic postcards. Then they fly to the nearest antenna, still called a cell site, and from there into a vast digital stream of underground fiber lines and satellites in orbit. Once inside the network, software routes each packet the fastest way possible. Some go across town, some across oceans, and at the other end, your friend's phone or laptop reassembles them instantly. Today's handoffs happen millions of times a second. The same concept that once carried 24 calls across Los Angeles now moves trillions of bits a second. A living nervous system for the planet and a living device in your hand.
- [27:44]
Arlene Harris
Today.
- [27:47]
Additional Narrator/Voice Actor
Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.
- [27:51]
Soni Kassam
The iPhone changed everything, but it didn't come from nowhere. Without the Dynatech, without spectrum access, without that Oval Office moment, none of it would exist. So if you're holding a phone right now, you're holding the result of a fight. And to be clear, these incredible results haven't come without a cost. We carry these devices everywhere. We sleep next to them. We check them hundreds of times a day. They've reshaped our attention, our privacy, even our sense of self. Marty knows this. He's not blind to the downsides. He spent recent years speaking about the harms of screen addiction, distraction and overreach. But the father of cell phones remains, at heart, an optimist.
- [28:40]
Marty Cooper
I'd like to believe that we are moving toward a better world. The cell phone industry is only just beginning.
- [28:56]
Soni Kassam
Many thanks to Marty Cooper and Arlene Harris for being our guests in this episode. And thank you for listening to 1440 Explorers. I'm Sony Kassam. Make sure to follow the show and leave a review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to your podcasts and let us know what you think at podcast at join1440.com while you're at it, start your learning journey with us at join140.com subscribe to our free daily and weekly newsletters on world affairs, business and finance, society and culture, and much more. 1440 Explorers is a production of Rhyme Media for 1440 Media. This episode was produced by Nicolo Magnoni and edited by Dan Bobkoff. Our fact checker is Meher Kazlebash, and our sound designer is Jay Khawat. The executive producer. The producer at Rhyme is Dan Bobkoff, and the executive producers at 1440 are me and Drew Steigerwald. See you next time.