The Very First Cell Phone Calls

When he went inside the Hilton to show it off to reporters, all he had to do was prove it worked. "To prove that the phone wasn’t an elaborate fake, he handed it around," writes Kennedy. "One reporter called Australia and was astonished when her mother’s voice came out of the plastic-covered device." 

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This "personal telephone," as he called it, didn't make it the consumers for another 10 years. He originally conceived as the phone as a way to assign numbers to an individual person, which is pretty much how things have worked out—for better or worse.