By Graham Smith and David Mccormack UPDATED: 10:23 EST, 3 April 2013 The world is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first call from a cell phone, which was made in New York City on April 3, 1973. That momentous first call was made by Motorola employee Marty Cooper, who used a prototype known as a DynaTAC to call rivals Bell Labs (then a division of AT&T) to inform them that they had been beaten in the race to achieve the technological breakthrough. Cooper, then 42, reportedly said: ‘I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end.’
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Motorola's Marty Cooper tested the first cell phone prototype on the streets of New York in 1973
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His first call was to his rival at Bell Labs to break the news that they had beaten them to developing the technology to make calls on the go
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It would be another 10 years before the phones were commercially available in the U.S.
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Today the mobile phone industry is $1.200bn annually
Mr Cooper, now 84, recalls: 'As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated @placeholder gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call.