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Hello I'm Louisa Dallgo and thank you for downloading the podcast of Witness History from the BBC World Service

firsthand accounts of events that have shaped our world and few recent inventions have changed our world as much as the mobile phone or

cell phone. I'm Louis Adaggo and today I'm taking you back to the very first mobile

phone call. It was made in New York in 1973 by the man who's been called the father of the

mobile phone, engineer Marty Cooper.

To the public it just sounded like science fiction.

Space, a final frontier.

You had been leashed by this wire for a hundred years to your desk and to your home, and we believe

that the people were fundamentally mobile, that people wanted to be connected wherever

they were. And we had to create this device

one that had never been made before and we did it in three months.

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

The story goes that it was the small handheld device, the communicator,

used in the 1960s science fiction TV show Star Trek that inspired Marty Cooper. But Marty says it was actually the two-way

wrist radio and the American comic strip Dick Tracy that first got him thinking.

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