A Fascinating Interview With Martin Cooper, Father of the Cell Phone

Vice’s Motherboard recently recorded a fascinating interview with Martin Cooper, largely considered the father of the cell phone. Cooper made the first public handheld cell phone call in 1973.

It was 1973 and Marty was walking through the streets of New York as journalists faithfully watched him make the first handheld mobile phone call to none other than AT&T’s cellular network engineer and chief nemesis in the cellular race, Joel Engel. Marty revealed to us that when Joel picked up there was silence at the other end of the line, “I suspected he was gritting his teeth,” Marty says with a light-hearted smile and a grain of cheekiness.