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Ten years after that first boastful phonecall they brought the portable phone to market, at a retail price of around $4,000.

Thirty years on, the number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide is estimated at six and a half billion. And Angry Birds games have been downloaded 1.7bn times.

That first portable phone was called a DynaTAC. The original model had 35 minutes of battery life and weighed one kilogram.

For years, my colleagues and I at Motorola had a dream. And that dream was that everyone someday would be free to talk wherever they were, would be unleashed from the copper wires that tied them to the network. And then the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, announced that they were about to make a decision.

We call that first phone the brick.

The battery life was only 20 minutes, but that was not a problem because you couldn't hold that heavy things up for more than 20 minutes.

Dr Martin Cooper, a former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, is considered the inventor of the first portable handset and the first person to make a call on a portable cell phone in April 1973.

Cooper, now 70, wanted people to be able to carry their phones with them anywhere.

11:00 AM-12:00 Noon , Thirty years ago today a man stood on a New York City sidewalk and changed history. Martin Cooper, who worked for Motorola, invented the handheld cell phone. On April 3rd, 1973, he placed the first call to the competition.

I called my counterpart at Bell Laboratories, a guy named Dr. Joel Engell, who was running the cellular telephone program at Bell Laboratories, and I told him, `Joel, I'm calling you from a real cellular telephone, a handheld unit.' Now I thought I could hear gnashing of teeth at the other end, but Joel was polite. And then I went on to other phone calls.

Martin Cooper was born in Liverpool in 1958 and studied art at the Laird School of Art in Birkenhead.

Between 1980 and 1989 Martin was a member of the highly successful pop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

Martin has exhibited extensively, both in the UK and overseas, and his pictures hang in many private collections. In recent years he has exhibited at the Williamson Art Gallery (Birkenhead), the Royal Academy of Arts (London), the David Messum Fine Art Gallery (London), W H Patterson (London), Woodhay Picture Gallery (Newbury), Llewellyn Alexander (London), the Brian Sinfield Gallery (Compton Cassey Galleries), Sarah Samuals Fine Art (Chester), Heritage House (Bermuda) and the Fel Gallery (Singapore).

The Dr. Martin Cooper story is truly an inspirational one, especially for all future scientist, entrepreneurs, and innovators.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 26, 1928, and earned his Bachelors and Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1950 and 1957 respectively. Martin Cooper, prior to his employment with Motorola in 1954, served in the Navy for 4 years, working on destroyers, and on submarines. He had also worked for a short time with another telecommunications company, before his historic association with Motorola.

today, there are more subscribers to mobile phones, than landlines all over the world, and the number is growing. The communication breakthrough of Martin Cooper did not go unnoticed, as he was awarded the Wharton Infosys Business Award in 1995, for his technological innovations in the communications field; a truly prestigious recognition from a reputable institution.

Cooper also has a “law” named after him.  Cooper’s Law states that our technology is advancing at such a rate that the number of different wireless communications possible in one location, at the same time will double every 30 months.  This “law” has held true since the first transmission by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895.  To illustrate, due to the method of transmitting this first signal, with a spark gap transmitter, it took up most of the radio spectrum to send this signal.  So the technology at that time more or less just allowed for one signal to be sent at any given time at a certain location.  Since then, every 30 months, the number of signals that can be transmitted at one time in one location has doubled.

In the United States, 86% of the time people are using the internet on their mobile device, they are simultaneously watching TV.  The average American smartphone user also spends about 2.7 hours per day socializing on their phone.

China: 906.8 million phones India: 851.7 million phones U.S. 302.9 million phones Russia 220.6 million phones Brazil: 217.3 million phones