MOBILE PHONES

It was 40 years ago today that the very first call was made on a mobile phone. Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, called a rival at another telecoms company in order to say that he was ringing from "a real cellular telephone". Nowadays there are more than 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world, which represents quite a change.

Mr. Cooper's phone was of course bigger than a brick and probably just as heavy. At the time, he thought that they would probably get smaller, but even he has been surprised by just how much smaller and just how much more sophisticated they have become.

It must be nice to have been the first human to have done something which eventually becomes so ubiquitous. I doubt that it will ever happen to me; though you never know ....

Walter Blotscher