The mobile phone
A telephone stops being tied to a place and becomes tied to a person.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 27 years
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Martin Cooper makes the first handheld cellular call in 1973, standing on a New York street and telephoning his rival at Bell Labs. Commercial networks arrive in the 1980s. Mobile telephony spreads faster than any previous technology and reaches populations that never had landlines — in much of Africa and South Asia the mobile phone was the first telephone, and later the first bank account and the first internet connection.