Can you hear me now?

Fifty years ago this week, an employee at Motorola named Martin Cooper standing on a midtown Manhattan street called his rival at AT&T and said, “I'm calling you from a cell phone. A real cell phone. A personal, handheld, portable cell phone."

Besides being quite a spicy humble brag, those were the words spoken over the first cell phone call in history. Considered the father of the modern cell phone, Cooper’s 1973 invention may have changed the course of modern communications as we know it.

• At the time, Bell Labs (the research wing of AT&T) was hard at work developing a car phone. But Cooper disagreed. If a phone was tied to a car, it was tied to a cord, and cords, Cooper argued, were against human nature.
• The future, Cooper said, was portable. And he was right – though it’d take another 10 years before Motorola released its first cell phone, the DynaTAC, to the public. Weighing in at 2.5 pounds and standing one foot tall, it retailed at the very reasonable price of $3,900 (about $12,000 today adjusted for inflation).

☎️ Zoom out: In 2021, 97% of Americans used a cell phone, up from 65% in 2002. Up next? According to Cooper, phones will soon live inside of our ears, and we’ll charge them with the energy created by eating food.

And though that may sound far-fetched, Cooper’s idea isn’t toooo far off from the brain-machine interfaces – like those developed by Elon Musk’s Neuralink – currently making waves in Silicon Valley.