The Gad About Town

The first mobile phone call was made 43 years ago today. A Motorola employee named Martin Cooper stood in midtown Manhattan, near a temporary base station, and phoned Motorola’s rival Bell Labs headquarters in New Jersey.

The moment was not recorded, but the event took place at a press conference, so Cooper is reported by many sources to have said to his competitor, “This is Marty. I’m calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone.” He was using an early version of the company’s DynaTAC mobile phone, which became commercially available and ubiquitous in the mid 1980s. The battery inside the two-and-a-half pound “brick” (seen above, on the cover of Popular Science from July that year) gave users 20 minutes of talk time and then needed to be charged for 10 hours.
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Sir Robert Watson-Watt was awarded a patent on this date in 1935 for a radio device to detect and locate a flying aircraft. The term RADAR was not coined until five years later by the U.S. Navy as the acronym for “RAdio Detection And Ranging,” but this was the first patent for a radar device.

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“2001: A Space Odyssey,” the film directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, made its world premiere at the Uptown Theater in Washington, DC, on this date in 1968. The title sequence (below the fold):
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