Martin Cooper won the race to develop the first cell phone when he phoned his archrival Joel Engel at Bell Labs in New Jersey from a contraption the size of a large breadbox on 6th Avenue to brag about his achievement. Interviewed on 60 Minutes decades he recalled the conversation. "Joel, this is Marty," Cooper said as a crowd watched him dial the number and make the cell phone call. I "I'm calling you from a cell phone – a real hand-held portable cell phone." "There was silence on the other end of the line, and he said something very nice and polite," Cooper said. "And to this day, he doesn't remember that phone call." The first phones were weighty (clocking in at 2.5 lbs) pricey (nearly $4000) and bulky (about a foot tall). There were also multiple production issues that slowed and a struggle at the FCC to carve out sufficient bandwidths for the radio waves. Consequently, it took decades for the phones to gain wide public acceptance.
