大象传媒

Exactly 50 years ago, on April the 3rd 1973, the first call on a mobile phone was made in New York by the engineer Martyn Cooper working for Motorola.

The founder of the virtual mobile phone museum here in the UK, Ben Wood, told Newsday: "The first phone was nicknamed the shoe as it was so big it was like holding a shoe to your head."

Now he says there's more phones on the planet than people. Motorola at that time said it would be fully operative in the city by 1976. It would enable a user to call from virtually anywhere in the metropolitan area to any other telephone in the world.

(Photo is of Motorola vice president John F. Mitchell showing the company's newest product-Dyna T-A-C Portable Radio Telephone System in New York city.)