Dynatac Cellular Telephone

The Motorola DynaTAC (an abbreviation of Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) was the first commercially available portable handheld cell phone. Motorola produced the DynaTAC in 1984 after more than a decade of research. The rectangular phone weighed 2.5 pounds, had 30 minutes of battery life, and sold for $4,000. A rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery pack attached to the back of the phone so one could quickly install a fresh battery. A fixed antenna attached to the top, and the phone came with a protective leather case.

For a century after Alexander Graham Bell’s telephones of 1876, service providers relied on wires to carry phone messages. After World War II, people grew concerned about the vulnerability of such systems in case of an attack. Engineers at Bell Labs, Motorola, and other companies, building on war work done on portable radios, believed that a wireless system would be more resilient and easier to repair. In 1973, a team at Motorola demonstrated a practical wireless system using handheld radio transmitters moving among a series of zones, called cells.

The Federal Communications Commission divided the United States into market areas and licensed cellular service to two companies in each market, one affiliated with a wire-line telephone company and one non-wired franchise. A company called Cellular One sold and provided service for this DynaTAC phone. A partnership of the American Radio Telephone Service and Motorola, Cellular One offered service in the Washington D.C. area.