The $3,995 Phone Call That Started the Mobile Age

Ten years before the first commercial cell phone call, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper stood on a New York sidewalk and made the first call from a handheld mobile phone — a brick-sized prototype he used to ring a rival at Bell Labs. It was 1973, and the future was audible but not yet for sale. The future went on sale on October 13, 1983, in the parking lot of Soldier Field in Chicago.

That morning, Ameritech — the regional phone company created in the breakup of AT&T — switched on America's first commercial cellular network. And the first paying customer was David D. Meilahn, a Chicago businessman who climbed into his Mercedes 380SL, picked up a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, and placed the first commercial cell phone call in history.

The phone was a marvel and a monster. The DynaTAC 8000X stood nearly a foot tall, weighed close to two pounds, and cost $3,995 — about the price of a new car. But on that October morning it was a ticket into history. From the driver's seat of his Mercedes, Meilahn dialed Bob Barnett, the head of Ameritech Mobile Communications, who was waiting for the call. The connection held. The first commercial cellular conversation had begun.

Barnett wasn't content to receive history — he wanted to extend it. After speaking with Meilahn, he placed a call of his own: to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who was in Germany. More than a century after Bell's first telephone call, his descendant answered on the device Bell's invention had become.

It is hard, from the age of the smartphone, to grasp how improbable that moment felt. Cellular service existed only in a few test zones. The phones cost as much as cars and did exactly one thing: make calls. Plenty of skeptics asked who would pay four thousand dollars to talk from a parking lot. But Ameritech's bet was that freedom from the cord was worth a fortune — and the bet paid off beyond anyone's imagining. Within a decade the brick had shrunk to pocket size; within two, the cell phone was remaking how the entire human race talked, worked, and found its way around.

The DynaTAC is now a museum piece, a slab of beige plastic with an extendable antenna. Yet every sleek phone in every pocket descends from it. The mobile age didn't begin in a laboratory. It began when a businessman in Chicago picked up an absurdly expensive phone and called his phone company — and the future picked up.

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