#TechWorld: Mobile Phone is Now 40 Years Old.

The first mobile phone call was made 40 years ago today, on 3 April 1973. Hurray!

Marty Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, called a rival colleague at another telecoms company and announced he was speaking from "a 'real' cellular telephone".

The DynaTAC 8000X, Motorola's first commercial handheld cellular phone, was launched in 1983

In 2012 a report carried out by the International Telecommunication Union found that there were six billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide.

At the time the global population was seven billion.

Phone father: Marty Cooper recalls making the first mobile phone call

Martin Cooper, now aged 85, is renowned as the "father" of the mobile phone.

He admitted he thought the initial cost of the devices (in 1983 the first models cost $3,500, or £2,300) might be prohibitive to the mobile phone becoming a mass-market product, but he did recognize that the hefty handsets would probably shrink.

"We did envision that some day the phone would be so small that you could hang it on your ear or even have it embedded under your skin," he said.

Mr Cooper said his vision for a mobile phone was first conceived in the late 1960s when the car telephone was invented by AT&T.

He wanted to create "something that would represent an individual so you could assign a number not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home but to a person," he said.

"It pleases me no end to have had some small impact on people's lives because these phones do make people's lives better. They promote productivity, they make people more comfortable, they make them feel safe and all of those things," Mr Cooper added.

He was also pleased to have been one step ahead of the competition.

"When you are a competitive entity like we were, it's one of the great satisfactions in life," he said.

HBC: Hurray!!!...Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell the father of Telephone itself...