The First Cell Phone Call Almost Got Bloody

On April 3, 1973, Motorola researcher Martin Cooper was perched on a New York City street corner on his way to a press conference, when he pulled out an enormous prototype phone in front of a few reporters and placed the first ever cell phone call, to a competitor at Bell Labs.

And in the process of stepping into telecommunications history, he almost got killed.

"I was talking and stepped into the street and almost got hit by a car," says Cooper of that ur-call, which was initiated at the northwest corner of 53rd Street and 6th Avenue, to Joel S. Engel, an erstwhile competitor and friend at Bell Labs, from a DynaTAC prototype. The phone had 35 minutes of talk time and weighed about 2.2 pounds; four iterations later, Cooper's team would reduce the phone's weight by half, finally launching in 1983 with a list price of about $4,000. Some Motorola executives believed that the high costs of mobile telephony would mean that cell phones would never reach beyond business users. "It cost so much and took so long," Mr Cooper told the Economist in 2009. "But my focus has always been on the long-term technology vision."

But Cooper's singular focus on making the mobile future couldn't have accounted for the distracting power of life with a ubiquitous computer, buzzing and beeping and demanding our attention in the middle of the street. Texting and driving is certainly a bad idea for anyone hoping to lead a lengthy life, but talking while walking can also be dangerous. In a bit of somewhat no-duh science, researchers from Stony Brook University recently reported that walking while texting or chatting on a cell phone may cause pedestrians to slow down or veer off course.

Things can get worse when headphones or headsets come into play: a recent study by the University of Maryland School of Medicine shows that the number of pedestrians struck and seriously injured by cars or trains while wearing headphones has skyrocketed in recent years, especially among teenagers and young men. In a 2007 paper, researchers reported that a distracted teen with attention deficit disorder is more at risk of an accident on the road than a drunk adult driver.

The 81-year-old engineer described his own distracted phone call in an interview that aired in 2010 with 60 Minutes' Morley Safer.

Safer, also in his 80's, seems a bit confused by the future of mobile devices, but Cooper seems to have the future on speed dial: he talks about cell phones that track personal health data, cellphone towers disguised as flag poles, and a future of phone-brains.

But he's also got a bone to throw to Safer and other old fogeys: Jitterbug, a cellphone he designed for children and the elderly that features a dial tone (ie, the sound you used to hear when picking up a "land line"). At the Jitterbug website, a set of "public safety" guidelines carry the legacy of Cooper's first call, four decades later: "Get to know your wireless device and its features so you can place your call without taking your attention off the road."

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