Cellular phone celebrated its 30th anniversary April 3

NEW YORK — It's time to make "Happy Birthday" the ring signal of your cell phone — last Thursday was the 30th anniversary of the first public demonstration of a call from a handheld wireless phone.

Martin Cooper, a researcher at Motorola Inc., made the call from the corner of 56th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan on April 3, 1973. Bystanders were agape at the spectacle, Cooper recalls.

"We were surprised, because we thought New Yorkers were so blase. We caused a great stir," he said.

The phone was a mammoth by today's standards — it weighed almost two pounds and was 10 inches long. Talk time was 20 minutes. Still, it was a huge advance over the car-mounted mobile phones that had been in use since the 1940s.

The purpose of the public demonstration was not just to dazzle New Yorkers. Motorola was at the time trying to head off regulatory approval of AT&T's vision of wireless communications, which focused on car phones.

"We thought the world was ready for personal communications, and the only way you do that is with handheld communications," Cooper said.

Cooper placed the first call to Joel Engel, the head of research at AT&T's Bell Labs.

"I told him: 'Joel, I'm calling you from a REAL cellular phone,' " Cooper said. "I thought I heard gnashing of teeth at the other end, but he was polite."

The Federal Communications Commission gave AT&T's competitors a slice of the wireless spectrum and, 10 years later, the first commercial cell phone network was inaugurated.

Cooper, 74, is now chief executive of ArrayComm Inc., a San Jose, Calif., company that is designing what he says is the next big advance in wireless technology: "smart" antennas that promise better reliability, lower cost and higher Internet browsing speeds.