On April 3, 1973 -- exactly 40 years from today -- Motorola employee Marty Cooper made the first mobile phone call.
Marty used a Motorola DynaTAC to call Bell Labs (then a division of AT&T), reportedly saying "I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end."
The device that Marty used to place the call was a prototype which would later become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x. It was the first commercially available mobile phone, and despite its meager specs for today's standards -- it weighed 2.5 pounds and only had a one-line, text-only LED display -- it cost a whopping $3,995.
The DynaTAC phone can be seen in action in several Hollywood films, including "Wall Street," where Gordon Gekko uses it to place a call from the beach, and "American Psycho," with Patrick Bateman using it to place a fake dinner reservation call.
With today's phones being immeasurably more powerful and a lot cheaper, there's one quality the mobile phone has lost -- exclusivity. If that's what you're after, well, you can always get yourself one of these.