Who made the world's first mobile phone call and when?

Exactly 50 years ago today, in 1973 on April 3, a phone call was made for the first time in the world by a mobile phone, BBC reports.

The first phone call was made by Martin Cooper, an engineer of the Motorola company, who is also called the "Father of the mobile phone". He called Joel Angell from the competitor AT&T Bell Laboratories to inform him that he was using a "personal, handheld, portable telephone."

"And I said, 'Joel, this is Martin Cooper... I'm talking to you on a handheld cell phone. But a real cell phone, personal, portable, handheld.'

"There was silence on the other end of the line. I think he was gritting his teeth."

The device that Cooper used to call was a Motorola DynaTAC phone, which weighed almost 800 grams and was 33 cm long. It took 10 hours to fully charge the phone.

"This phone weighed over a kilo –– about two and a half pounds –– and had a battery life of roughly 25 minutes of talking," he says.

"That was not a problem. This phone was so heavy, you couldn't hold it up for 25 minutes."

At that time, SMS messages were still out of the question, the phone could only make and receive calls.

A commercial version of the phone used by Martin Cooper, the Motorola Dynatac 8000X, was released in 1983 – 10 years after the historic call. Motorola Dynatac 8000X was sold in the US at that time for $3995.