First Commercial Cell Phone Call - 40 years ago

[taiwan_girl]

David Meilahn, a suburban Chicago insurance agent, was the first.

In a Soldier Field parking lot, 40 years ago Friday, Meilahn bested 13 other early adopters in a promotional race to see who could activate their preinstalled car phones and make the first commercial cellular call in the U.S.

Chicago was both the birthplace of the cellphone and the epicenter of the nascent technology’s development. In 1973, Motorola executive Martin Cooper made the first cellular call in New York with a brick-like prototype built by the then Schaumburg-based company. Engineers at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories built out an experimental system in the Chicago area in the late 1970s, refining a network to hand off calls as users traveled from one cell to the next.

In June 1983, Ameritech filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to turn the experimental cellular network into a commercial one. The Ameritech system covered a 2,500-square-mile area across the Chicago metro, providing service from Lake Forest to Geneva to Beecher. It got the green light from the FCC on Oct. 6 and went live one week later.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-biz-first-commercial-cell-call-chicago-customer-20231013-mlrn34d4znfezmq6us32uey72i-story.html

[George K]

I got my first cell phone (a built-in car phone - a Uniden) in 1989.

At that time, you could pick your phone number. I still have that same number.

[jon-nyc]

My father sat on the EIA committee that defined the interoperability standards for the cellular telephone network of the United States. He was closely involved in this from the 70s until the mid 80s.