The first phone weighed over two pounds.
Wikimedia COmmonsIn 1973, the first call from a hand-held device was made with a phone shaped like a brick that weighed about 2.4 pounds. Martin Cooper, an executive at Motorola, picked up the large device – one that only worked for 30 minutes of chatting after a 10-hour charge – and called Dr. Joel Engel, an engineer at their rival company, Bell Labs, reported Wired.
Over the past half-century, the cell phone has become much smaller and easier to carry around, and it’s evolved to connect us in ways that Cooper and Engel perhaps never imagined.
In 1983, Motorola released a $4,000 phone.
Wikimedia CommonsIt took about 10 years to make the phone Cooper used for the first call available to the commercial public. According to Wired, in 1983, Motorola released the DynaTAC which was still bulky and heavy and cost approximately $4,000 But it wasn’t until 1989 that phones began to shrink in size with the Motorola MicroTac, a flip phone small enough to fit inside a shirt pocket.