Posted on 04/03/2011 7:56:18 AM PDT by Brandonmark
CNN) -- Sunday is the anniversary of something that undoubtedly has changed your life.
Whether for good or for bad is a question only you can answer.
On this day in 1973 -- on April 3 of that year -- a man did something no one had ever done before.
You may bless him for it or curse him for it. At this juncture, it hardly matters. The impact of what he did is so enormous that judging it now is almost beside the point.
The man's name was Martin Cooper. He was 44 at the time.
He made a cell phone call.
The world's first. At least the first public one; the cell phone had been tested in the lab, but never tried in the real world.
"As I walked down the street while talking on the phone," Cooper once told an interviewer, "sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call."
There had been car phones before -- mobile radios, really. They were powered by heavy equipment that had to be stashed in the trunk of the automobile.
But Cooper, who was the general manager of Motorola's communications systems division, had the idea that people didn't want to be tethered to a stationary telephone, even if the phone could ride along with them in their car. He thought that the phone should be so portable that it could go anywhere they went.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Used a Motorola HT-200 with an added DTMF encoder to place "autopatch" calls in '77 after getting tech ham ticket.
Used WR5ABY 146.88 Dallas/DARC and WR5ABE 146.(don't recall freq) in Irving at the time to make those 'calls' ...
Motorola HT-200 portable radio (model run from 1960 - 1970 or so): mfwright.com/mikeht220/ht200.html
Motorola HT-220 shown in right-background ...
I have read “The Victorian Internet.” The Gordon book looks good.
Over the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve done extensive reading on the history of communications and news gathering.
Since I do my own newsblog and have no “formal journalistic training,” I thought some history of the craft would be helpful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line
The Chappes carried out experiments during the next two years, and on two occasions their apparatus at Place de l’Étoile, Paris was destroyed by mobs who thought they were communicating with royalist forces. However in the summer of 1792 Claude was appointed Ingénieur-Télégraphiste and charged with establishing a line of stations between Paris and Lille, a distance of 230 kilometres (about 143 miles). It was used to carry dispatches for the war between France and Austria. In 1794, it brought news of a French capture of Condé-sur-l’Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred. The first symbol of a message to Lille would pass through 15 stations in only nine minutes. The speed of the line varied with the weather, but the line to Lille typically transferred 36 symbols, a complete message, in about 32 minutes.
Actually, yes I do, because I am disabled after a gentleman ran a yield sign and tore off the front of my car and left me with RSD/CRPS a chronic pain issue. So surfing for info is a part time job now.
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