The first handheld mobile phone call was made in 1973 by a Motorola engineer who stood on a New York street and called his rival at a competing company.

Martin Cooper deliberately phoned Joel Engel at Bell Labs, Motorola's chief competitor in the race to build a portable phone, essentially to say he'd got there first. The prototype he used weighed about a kilogram and offered roughly half an hour of talk time on a charge that took hours to complete.